The Messenger (28 page)

Daria nods and starts to go, then reaches back to touch Monica on her big shoulder. “Thank you …” she says.

She goes into the living room, falls onto the sofa, and must lose consciousness, because the next thing she realizes is that Monica is sitting there, giving her an injection in her arm.

“Antibiotic,” Monica says quietly, “and this one is tetanus …”

“Thank you …” Daria says dreamily, and then Monica leaves to take her battered Cherokee on its rounds while she lies still on the sofa, watching the television.

Photographs of a smoking horizon, blurry pictures of cocoa-colored mountains in the distance. Afghanistan, she thinks. A huge dust cloud as seen from a helicopter’s point of view. Another shot of the same.

A map of the Kashmir, where the first artillery shells have begun to explode in the undeclared war between India and Pakistan.

“Leave her alone, she’s still sick,” she hears Nadja say from the doorway.

She wakes out of a sleep so profound that for a long moment she does not recognize who she is, where she is. Her perceptions since landing in the arms of the angels at Monica’s are fractured. She gradually realizes that Brutus has shown up with more groceries.

“This is all very nice, but we need some vegetables. Is there a store that sells that, or perhaps one of the restaurants …” Nadja is saying to him.

“Carrots and shit, I can get that. I get you whatever you want, Naj.”

“Okay. Something to eat. She can’t have a baby just eating french fries.”

“I gotcha …”

“Not yet you don’t,” Nadja says, and reaches up and slaps at him, just playing really. He slips back out of range. “Hey, girl, don’t light some fire that you can’t put out,” he warns before he leaves.

Monica stops by with Xavier and his friend, both boys on bicycles. She has brought grapes and lettuce. “Always a good idea to have something cool and wet. Get some cracked ice to suck on. She’s got to keep up her fluids, you remember that.…” She bustles back to the kitchen to check on things.

Daria becomes aware of someone above her—Monica, sitting on the edge of the sofa. “How are you this morning?” A cool hand on her brow. She’s going to be killing all these people, Daria thinks. “I have to give you the shot.”

“Okay …”

“What this is, is the shot for the smallpox … and all of y’all are going to be getting them.” Monica rubs the muscle in her shoulder with a cold cotton ball, everything sanitary, latex gloves.

“It’s not supposed to work, you know,” Daria says.

“What are you talking about? Sure it works …” Monica slides the needle in. There’s no pain. None at all.

“It only makes it last longer …”

Monica takes the needle out and drops it in a plastic box that has biohazard stickers all over it. Then sits back up and looks at her with a frown. “I want to take your temperature.” The thermometer whips out. “Let’s check that wound.… Do you have any allergies?”

“Hmm-mm … don’t think so …”

Monica lowers the T-shirt, reaches around and takes her wrists, inspects them closely, then her ankles.

“Something might have bit you.” She shakes her head. “I think you’re fine, but it might be a reaction off of the shots from yesterday. Is your arm sore?”

“Everything is sore.” It sounds so obvious that she laughs and instantly regrets it.

Monica takes out the thermometer and reads it. “A little high, but … you’ll get better,” she says, getting up off the sofa and heading back to spend time with Paulina.

“No, I won’t,” Daria says to herself.

“Turn that garbage off,” Daria hears Monica say in the other room, and the radio falls silent.

Daria takes her time getting back to the bathroom, has a pee that seems to take hours, and then shuffles out to the kitchen. She is about to make tea, when she stops dead in the room, and looks around.

“No, I won’t get better,” she says. She hears her voice. She is just speaking to an empty room. “No … I won’t,” she says, and turns back for the living room.

It only takes her a few painful minutes to get dressed. She fumbles
on her boots, and reclaims the backpack from the corner where she’s tossed her stuff.

Just as she is reaching for the doorknob, it suddenly opens in her face and Brutus comes in with a ten-pound bag of party ice.

“Hey, where you goin’? I’ll give you a ride anywhere you want to go …”

“No … it’s okay …” she says, but he is past her, already down at the end of the hall. Monica steps out and sees her standing there at the door.

“Where are you going? You can’t go anywhere. What the hell is the matter with you?” Nadja comes out on her heels.

“I have to leave. I can’t stay here anymore.” She gets the door open, but has to lean against it for a moment. “I have to …”

“You’re just about to fall down. You can’t even walk. You come with me …” Monica and Nadja carry her back to the sofa. She begins to cry, and they try to quiet her.

She is propped on the sofa, soft pillows wedged under her arm. Someone brings her a glass of ginger ale cooled with shards of Brutus’s ice. He is standing there behind the curtains watching them through the fabric. She can’t stop crying.

Monica’s big hand smooths her brow.

“You just breathe deep and let everything go. You’re going to be just fine …” she says.

She falls into a deep sleep, with Nadja sitting beside her. She doesn’t really wake up, only comes to the surface every so often, missing half of the television they watch. Sitcoms so old that the hairstyles are new again. Faces that she has seen all her life. Semi-famous actors that she recognizes but the names are lost. Actors. Really they are not anything special, she decides, watching them as they go through their poses. Just ordinary humans who happen to be a little funnier, scarier, or prettier than the rest.

She and Nadja watch one of the episodes of
Star Wars
, the early years when Natalie Portman is the Queen.

If Natalie were playing her part right now, they would put oil in
her hair, a pale foundation on her face, and dark circles under her eyes. Just a trace of color, green or yellow under everything. A fine sheen of sweat across her collarbones. The rims of her eyes would be red from crying, and her nose runny and sore from blowing it constantly.

She fades in and out. Dreaming of Natalie, black swans, and rocket ships. In her dreams she walks on white beaches, her brown feet digging into the sand, the surf roaring.

“… drink some of this.” She hears Nadja’s voice and she feels the cool glass against her lips. Drinks. And then sleeps some more.

The next time she wakes Monica has brought a tray with a bowl of chicken soup. The television is showing a documentary about sea urchins.

“Your fever is gone. You broke through, I think.”

“That’s good …”

“Uh-huh … And I think nobody has caught your cold.” She looks deeply into her eyes. “Tell me the truth. What are you trying to kick?”

“What?”

“Are you on withdrawal from anything? You taking pills or anything like that?”

“Espresso …”

“Oh, yeah … funny. You having those little headaches?”

“All the time.”

“Well, if that’s all it is, I think you can stand a cup of coffee.” Monica goes back out to the kitchen.

Daria reaches for the remote and cycles around looking for the news, thinking that she is beginning to understand these women, these big powerful steamrolling mothers. Able to move mountains, keep the sass down to a minimum, and bind a whole neighborhood together, as long as they have the police on their side and enough carbohydrates.

On-screen an older man in a military uniform is talking to the youthful but gray-haired host. As he talks he makes a slight chopping motion with his hand to emphasize his points.

“It only slows it down,” she says to the screen.

Monica comes through the curtain with a cup of steaming coffee. “Don’t drink too much of this if you think it’s going to bother your insides.”

“No …” she says, pushing her nose over the rim of the cup and inhaling the deep inky aromas.

Monica lets her drink, then sits beside her and lifts her T-shirt and looks at the dressing. “We are going to have to change this …” She goes out into the hall and brings her bag back, begins snipping the gauze away. “Take a deep breath now, can you do that? How bad does that hurt?”

Tears in her eyes, Daria does everything she is told. As soon as she can, she will leave this house. Maybe after cutting her hair she’s not infectious any longer; maybe the vaccination that she got from Monica will prevent it, or delay it, or weaken the virus. Perhaps she won’t be killing them.

“Can I take a shower?” she asks.

“I guess. Can you stand up and not fall down in there?”

“I think so …”

“Put a plastic bag over the tape. We don’t want to try to pull that off you just yet. I’ll help.”

They shuffle into the bathroom, and she takes off her T-shirt and lets Monica build a little skirt around her breasts with a garbage bag and a long strip of adhesive tape. It is finicky work.

“Do you have any skills, Daria?”

“I’m an actor. I took several acting classes. I liked the drama. The idea that you could be someone else.”

“Well, you can’t.” Monica frowns. “You have to be yourself.”

She presses the garbage bag against the center of Daria’s spine. Holds it in place, takes the tape from her and tacks it across beneath her shoulder blades. “So, you say you don’t have any skills. Can you drive?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Read and write? You went to school?”

“Sure. I graduated.”

“And you’re a Russian too?”

“No, no … I’m from Florence.”

“Italy. My niece is over there at school. She’s an artist too.” She finishes with Daria’s garbage-bag halter top, steps back and points to the bullet hole.

“You can still die from that,” she says, and leaves her to her shower.

Daria digs her fingernails in and scrubs and scrubs her reddened hair. Blows soapy water through her mouth and nose until she gags, and does it again. She pushes her fingers into her ears and screws them around. She scrapes behind her ears, rubs her elbows, the backs of her thighs, her feet, opens her mouth, sucks in the water and spits it out. Turns the water up until it’s steaming and rubs her skin with soap all over again, moving slowly, breathing carefully,
scrubbing all the orifices, creases, and folds of her flesh as far as she can reach. She does it until it hurts, turns the water hotter until it is scalding. But it is not enough.

She cannot twist herself into shapes painful enough, cannot feel the rib spreading apart for long enough. It could not be nearly enough unless she were to puncture a lung. And even that might not be sufficiently painful, she might not even feel it. She might only start coughing blood.

And it doesn’t happen, anyway. She doesn’t die. She only sobs in the shower and scrubs her hair again and again, and when she dries off, notices a ring of red spots on the blushing skin of her stomach. Just a ring of red spots. Only a trace of a rash on her belly. And raises her eyes to see her face, the face of death, contort in the mirror.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry …”

After a sleepless night Sam Watterman has decided that he can’t just sit around on his ridiculously high consultant’s fee and meekly do whatever Reilly’s spooks tell him to do.

He needs to spin things, spin them his way, or he’ll get spun, and he doesn’t want to live through that again.

Without a secure cell phone, he has to submit a list of people he intends to call. He’d make some kind of a deal with Chamai to borrow his if he weren’t afraid of getting the young man in trouble. When he complains about the policy, Barrigar says to give him the list and he’ll set something up. Sam puts down people he knows will get the word out: Annette Guerrier at the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Paris; Nick Van Slyke in London, who can move mountains for British Public Health; and Bertugliati at Johns Hopkins, who twice offered him a job that he had been too arrogant to take. Sanjay in Mumbai. With any luck he’ll be able to establish a channel for the scientists alone.