The Nirvana Plague (28 page)

“We’re not anthropologists, Carl. We’re not here to study IDD, we’re here to stop it.”

“I know what we’re here for, colonel.”

Benford looked genuinely surprised. “Then what’s your problem, doctor?”

“I don’t like forcing people who are not legitimately sick to take medication, to say nothing of removing them from their homes and families and jobs. Hell, I don’t like it even when they
are
legitimately sick, but I do it if I have to, if they’re incapacitated. But—”

“You don’t think these people are incapacitated?”

“I don’t think we know enough to say they are. I certainly don’t think we can say that they’re more incapacitated by IDD than they are by the drugs we’re doping them with.”

“You know, in the meeting I thought you were just oversimplifying things for the Secretary’s benefit, but you’re actually serious?”

“For all we know, we could be making it worse.”

“Worse?”

“IDD is triggered by stress. We’re pretty much agreed on that. Well, we’re putting
more
stress on these cases. Coercive treatments, isolation, cutting them off from their social networks, their families. IDD is a stress reaction. It’s a strategy for alleviating psychological stress. By creating stress for these people, we could actually be making them worse while telling ourselves we’re just trying to make them better.”

Benford shook her head. “It’s a disease, doctor. It’s infectious. Let’s find out what it is and kill it.”

But Marley saw that he was getting to her. And he was getting caught up in his own argument now. He was discovering as he talked why he was so agitated. “Look, colonel, we’re not doing good science here. We have no controls. We have no clear idea of what we’re trying to accomplish. And we’re violating ethical protocols a dozen times a day.”

“We’re cutting corners in a time of national emergency.”

“How do we know it’s an emergency?”

“Oh come on!”

“Suppose we just stop trying to cure them altogether and watch what happens? My guess is that IDD is self-limiting. My guess is that they’ll grow out of it, just as people generally grow out of other stress reaction syndromes.”

“Grow out of it? How long is this going to take, do you think? Nobody,
nobody
has recovered from IDD yet, not since the first cases over three months ago. Damn it, you know it’s spreading like wildfire!”

Marley stood and stalked away, up to the fence, hooked his fingers into the cold links and leaned into it like he meant to pull it down. The sea mist was thickening. He heard a clanging sound echoing up from the village below, like someone hammering a steel drum.

“Are you on board with this idea too?” Benford asked Delacourt.

“First I’ve heard of it,” she answered. “I don’t know about dropping everything cold, but I do think Dr. Marley has a point.”

Marley turned around again suddenly. “OK, there’s an idea!” he said, stepping toward them. “Let’s take a few of them off the meds. At least it’ll give us some kind of a control, something to compare against.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Benford said.

Marley played his trump: “I’m not dosing anyone else with meds.”

“What makes you so damn special?”

“I’m a doctor. Do no harm, and all that?”

“You’ll follow protocol just like the rest of us.”

“Fuck it. I’m done. Put me in jail. Except I am in jail.”

He watched her get herself under control. She was wound up so tight at this point that he could almost see her humming under the stress.

Finally she answered: “All right, Carl. Maybe we need to be doing more outside-the-box thinking. All right. But. What we are
not
going to do now is drop everything, cross our fingers, and hope for the best while we watch this thing play out in the wild. We can’t afford to take that chance.” She stood up, looked him in the eye. “Pick three subjects. I’ll give you a week.”

“I want Roger Sturgeon, Fred Peters, and one of the female patients. Reynolds.”

“Peters isn’t your patient.”

“Make him my patient.”

“Why him in particular?”

“Same reason as Sturgeon. Because I knew him before it happened. Makes it easier to identify the effects of the disease.”

“All right. You’ve got a week.”

“Two weeks.”

“Ten days.”

The next morning Karen awoke, as usual, in front of the television.

Freedom Day,
she thought. The thirty-first day. Welcome to the new reality.

Freedom Day. And what’s the news? Still less freedom. It came as no surprise to her though. She talked to Ally every day, and Ally talked to Marley three times a week. He’d been explicitly scrupulous in his adherence to the constraints of his secrecy clearance, but it hadn’t been hard for Ally to read the hints he let drop that whatever it was he and his team were doing to combat IDD, it wasn’t working. She’d last spoken to him a couple of days ago, and told Karen later that as the thirty days counted down, Carl was becoming increasingly stressed. And, knowing what she did about the effects of the disease, Karen could see the signs of IDD in the news as well: however heavily distorted by Defense Department censorship and mass-media streamlining, the sanitized combat reports couldn’t disguise the simple fact that there was a noticeable lack of actual combat going on in any of the half-dozen theatres in which the U.S. was engaged.

She got up from the chair, stretched, wrapped herself in her blanket, and went to the window. The cat was on the sill. She cranked the window open a little. A clear, bright morning. She scratched the cat while the news droned on in the background.

She went to the kitchen and started coffee, and while she waited for it she got online and got her health certificate authorized.

The President is up early today, she thought. To make the morning news shows. — No, he probably taped it days ago.

After a breakfast of toast and jam, she showered and dressed. Then, for the first time in thirty days, she walked out of her apartment, down the stairs, and got in her car. The battery was not dead. Tender mercy.

She continued listening to the news on the radio while she drove.

The streets, by the standards of Chicago traffic, were practically deserted. She made it to Chicago County General in forty minutes flat. She had to present her new health cert to get into the parking building. The guard was wearing blue Nitrile gloves. He wanded her card and handed it back to her. He studied her skeptically while he waited for her authorization to come through. She could see the news playing on a screen inside his booth. She asked if the hospital was worried about letting any sick people in. He didn’t like the joke.

She had to go through the whole thing again with a different guard at the entrance to the hospital lobby.

The lobby was a zoo. The emergency room was so backed up people were sitting in the public lounge waiting for treatment, some coughing and hacking, some holding broken or disjointed limbs in place, some blinking and shivering and trying not to jump out of their skins as their bodies metabolized intoxicants. Mothers and wives milled about, quietly crying or noisily complaining or trying to soothe screaming babies. The place stank of urine and vomit and disinfectant. The threadbare carpet was sticky underfoot. The news blared or squeaked from screens suspended over each corner of the room.

In the midst of this churning chaos, the information desk foundered like a dismasted ship. A wary girl with green hair sat there hoping not to be bothered. The news was playing on screens behind the desk too.

“I am Roger Sturgeon’s wife,” Karen said. “He’s being released today. I’ve come to pick him up.”

The receptionist punched up her screen, and asked her to spell that name.

Karen spelled it.

The girl tapped it out on her keyboard. She was wearing Latrile gloves. “Sorry,” she said, and looked up, “we don’t have any patient by that name.”

Karen spelled it again.

“No, ma’am. Sorry.”

“Check again. S-t-u—”

“I’ve checked it twice. Are you sure you have the right hospital?”

Without moving from her spot, Karen took out her phone and dialed the Board of Health.

“Good morning,” chirped the secretary, “this is—”

“Give me DeStefano, please.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Who
would
be calling, Nancy?”

“Well, all
right.”

She waited, not moving from her spot in front of the information desk. She watched two nurses going through the lobby with tablets, screening the patients and checking ID’s.

It took two minutes for DeStefano to come on the line. It always did. She imagined he sat at his desk with a stopwatch, because a real executive is always two minutes too busy to take an unexpected call. Her call had been unexpected every morning for thirty days straight.

“Good morning, Kar—”

“I’m at Chicago County General. They can’t find my husband.”

Pause.

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either.”

Pause.

“Why are you calling me this morning?”

Karen began to wonder how many seconds remained before she completely lost her mind. T-minus nine, eight, seven.

“I’m calling you for the same reason I call you every morning, DeStefano. I want to speak to my husband. Only this time I’m out of quarantine, and so is he, and I’m at the goddamned hospital to take him home only they can’t find him. Now this
is
the hospital you put him in, right? Chicago General. This is where he’s supposed to be, right?”

“Oh, yes, of course it is,” he said. Glad to help!

“Well, where is he?”