Virus: The Day of Resurrection (10 page)

“Excuse me?” said Noriko, her eyes opening wide in surprise. “I thought I covered arts and entertainment now.”

“You were on the health and medicine beat before that, weren’t you?” the desk editor said with a scowl. “Help me out here, will you? Things are really busy, and two of my rookies are laid up. I hear one ran into a car—and warm as it is—the other went off skiing and broke a leg.”

“Those guys. As long as there’s snow somewhere, they’ll get out in it.” Noriko gave a little smile. “Can’t you send Tame?”

“His job in the Kansai region took a little longer than expected. He’ll be flying back this evening. The society page is a little sparse. There’s nothing going on that’s really begging to be reported. So let’s go with the flu.”

“Isn’t it a little early for that?” Noriko said turning her head. “It’s still stalled out around Taiwan, isn’t it?”

“Hong Kong,” the desk editor said. “But it’ll be here soon. There’s already a mass outbreak in Kita-Kyushu, and anyway they say this is going to be a year for big epidemics of both.”

“Not again.” Noriko frowned. “Flu again? And they’re saying we’ll have nice weather from here on.”

“Please do it. Just forty lines will be plenty. Phone it in if you need to.”

The weather was nice outside. A warm wind was catching up dust from the pavement. People who were already dressing quite lightly were out walking to enjoy the spring sunshine.

Not again!
Inside the car, Noriko looked up at warm scenery and a sky tinged reddish brown from soot and smoke and cringed.
And I come down with it so easily!

She had come down with a terrible flu several years ago. Headache, stuffy nose, coughing, a steady fever of forty degrees, difficulty breathing, and no matter what kind of medicine she was prescribed nothing helped. She had been flat on her back for ten full days.

Whenever she thought of the difficulty of those days, the loneliness of her solitary life would come suddenly crashing in on her.

This dust is awful!
Noriko thought, holding her breath and frowning as she rolled up the window all the way.
And these exhaust fumes. There’s been a lot of fuss for some time now about this city smog causing lung cancer, but they don’t reduce it in the slightest. The world isn’t making much progress at all.

There was a little time before her interview in Akasaka, so she went to the Ministry of Health and Welfare first and asked to see Mr. Shibata, a technical official whom she had often used as a source on her old beat.

“Well, hey there!” the pale, thin-faced official said, giving her that bookish smile of his. “You have returned.”

“Just for today,” Noriko said. “I’d like to hear about the flu and polio outbreaks.”

“Oh, that?” he said as though it were nothing to be concerned about. “It’s reached Tokyo already. Four hospitalized in Shinagawa.”

“For what?”

“Polio. The flu arrived in Kita-Kyushu.”

“What’s being done about it?”

“For the polio, there’s quite a lot of live vaccine ready to go. As for the flu, well …”

“Don’t clam up on me. City Hall is—”

“But we have to figure out what kind of flu virus it is that’s going around now.” Shibata flashed another thin smile. “It isn’t clear yet whether it’s Type A or Type B. And this one spreads like lightning.”

“Why not just prepare stocks of vaccine for both?”

“It might not help. A simple life-form like a virus can mutate very, very easily. It’s fair to say it’s different in nearly every epidemic. Remember the big one in 1957?”

“Yeah, the one called Asian flu?”

“Yep, that’s the one. That one wasn’t Type A or Type B. It was a new strain they called Tokyo A-57. Thanks to that, it was a nightmare coming up with a vaccine for it. Kumamoto University’s looking at this one for us. A fellow from the Chemo-Sero-Therapeutic Research Institute is helping out too.”

“So eggs are about to get expensive again?” Noriko made a sour face. “And here they were just saying that prices would drop now that spring is here.”

“Spring flus aren’t easy to cure.”

“Do you keep enough vaccine nowadays for Asian flu too?”

“Well, we bought three million two hundred thousand eggs back then to make just five hundred liters of vaccine.” Shibata’s face looked troubled. “Everybody says ‘vaccine’ this and ‘vaccine’ that, but when it comes to making the stuff, it’s a whole lot of trouble. You’ve got to implant the strain inside an egg, and after that it takes as many as a hundred days to make the finished product. Now, our production ability is improving somewhat, but even if we used the full capacity of the whole country … I don’t know if we could vaccinate even thirty percent of the population.”

“How many people could you vaccinate with five hundred liters?”

“Five hundred thousand adults,” he replied, rapping his desk with his knuckles. “
Five million
people got infected with Asian flu.”

“Just a drop in the bucket.” Noriko winced. “But oh well. You don’t die from influenza, so if you just take aspirin or something …”

“Hey, this isn’t a joke.” Shibata’s face grew a little more serious. “We’ll be in trouble if former medical journalists start spreading bad info like that. Depending on the year, the death rate from influenza can actually be quite high. Especially among children and the elderly, who have weaker resistance. Even among adults, people with heart problems or complications from stuff like pneumonia have to be careful. The A-57 flu had quite a high fatality rate.”

“Don’t go trying to scare me,” Noriko said, lighting up a cigarette. “I’ve been told I might have Wilson’s disease, not that I really know what that means.”

“Well, you should be careful, then,” Shibata said teasingly. “And because it’s hitting together with polio, well, if there are double infections, that’s worrisome for the children.”

She offered him the pack of cigarettes, but he shook his head. “I’ve quit for good,” he said. “Didn’t you quit for a while yourself?”

“The minute I quit covering medicine I went right back to it.” Noriko laughed out loud. “Also, that fuss about lung cancer has died down now.”

“And that’s the problem with the media,” he said with a laugh of his own. “As soon as the fuss dies down, they forget all about things. Things fade away as topics, but their reality goes on.”

“But they say that in America, they’ve finally got that miracle drug for cancer, right?”

“Oh yeah … they’re saying it was the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York that discovered it.” Shibata said this as though it were no particularly impressive achievement. “But now they’ve got to get the clinical trials going for real, and they don’t know what the side effects of long-term use are—you ought to be careful for another two or three years.”

“Not to worry. I have a very long lifeline,” Noriko said as she stood up to go. “Even cancer’s become curable—I’m gonna live to be a hundred and go to Mars someday.”

“Leaving already?” the technical officer said, a bit disappointed. “Just a minute; I’ve still got something else interesting to tell you.”

“And what would that be?”

“We don’t have a clear tally just yet, but lately there’s been another increase in that so-called ‘sudden death disease.’ ”

“Sudden death disease?” Noriko turned her head slightly. “That’s fairly old news, isn’t it? Stories about healthy people suddenly dropping dead late at night.”

“Yeah, apparently exhaustion can build up in busy people and cause neurogenic heart attacks. There’s been another sudden uptick in cases since the start of spring.”

“I’ll come by again—I’ve got to get to some non-clinical work now, though.” Suddenly, she felt a tickle at her nostrils and sneezed lightly. “Oh, I hate this!” Noriko said, pressing a handkerchief over her nose. “I may have caught the flu just by coming here and listening to you talk about it.”

“Wow! You really do have a sensitive constitution.”

“Hey.” Noriko turned around at the door. “We can cure cancer and we can broadcast live television worldwide, so why can’t we stop something as simple as influenza?”

“That’s how the world works. While we’re launching rockets to Mars and spending money on our daydreams, what percentage of the world’s current population do you think is adequately served by good doctors and treatment facilities? Smallpox is constantly going around in Nepal.” In an ironic tone, he added, “Give us half the budget that Defense gets every year, and there wouldn’t be a single contagious disease we couldn’t beat back.”

When Noriko stepped outside, she could practically feel the air teeming with germs and viruses all around her. Influenza and polio infecting the air.
Can they not even exterminate the little things that go around spreading disease—the mosquitoes and flies, and even the mice?

The sensation she had felt was soon forgotten, however, in a warm shower of spring sunlight pouring down from above, and in thoughts of a celebrity interview to be held in a swanky hotel.

So as to come to the interview fresh, Noriko first called the editorial department at her weekly and dictated the influenza story to them. Then she went to the hotel to meet an entertainer from the Kansai region who had come up to the capital.

Late that night and rather drunk, Noriko came back to her midtown apartment. She was humming as she climbed the steps to the second floor. The sticky feel of the spring night was present even in the dim hallway. She unlocked the door, but just as she was about to go inside, a small object caught against the door and was dragged across the floor. She fixed her drunken eyes on it, and when they focused on that soft little thing, her throat let loose with a high-pitched scream. Gone completely pale, Noriko slammed the door shut, and with her purse still hanging from her arm, lunged for the telephone. After ringing for a long time, someone answered the phone, and Noriko felt relief wash over her.

“Oh, thank goodness you went on back!” Noriko exhaled.

“What’s the matter?” The voice on the line belonged to a slightly intoxicated TV director, from whom she had parted company only a few minutes earlier.

“Please, I am begging you, come over here now!” Noriko said, fighting back the bitter saliva that was rising back up in her throat.

“What in the world’s going on? Did something happen to you?”

“Just get over here!” Her words ended in a long, loud scream that this time she couldn’t hold back any longer.

“Hey!” the voice’s owner shouted, surprised. “What on earth is going—”

Noriko hung up the phone and backed up against the wall.

On the
carpet
at her feet, there were more. Two more of them.

“They’re just mice,” the director said with a grimace.

“But I can’t stand mice. And dead mice are even worse.”

“Even if you didn’t put out rat poison,” the man said, closing the garbage chute, “somebody else in another room must have.”

“Wash your hands, okay?” Noriko called from a distance. “There’s cresol under the sink. Um, I’m sorry, but can you scrub here and here too?”

“Nervous, aren’t we?” the man laughed as he did as she asked. The room soon smelled like a hospital. “There we go,” he said. When he had finished the task, he looked around the room a little embarrassedly and wiped his palms off on his hips.