“Why hasn’t Mr. Bernard been transformed completely?” asked the representative from Denmark, a young-looking plump man in a black suit, his hair like close-cropped fur. “Our few communications with the United States show that transformation and dissolution takes place within a week of infection.”
“I don’t know,” Bernard said. “My circumstances are not the same as victims in a natural environment. Perhaps the organisms in my body are aware that it would do them no good to complete the transformation.”
The dismay on their faces showed they were still not used to the concept of noocytes. Or perhaps they simply did not believe.
Paulsen-Fuchs continued the discussion, but Bernard closed his eyes and tried to shut the visitors out. It was worse than he had imagined; in just four days, he had been subjected—politely enough, and with great concern—to fourteen such meetings, to a battery of tests conducted through the sliding panel, to questions about every aspect of his life, past, present, private and public. He was the center of a secondary shock wave spreading around the world—the wave of reaction to what had happened in North America.
He had gotten out just in time. The etiology of the plague had altered drastically and now followed several patterns, or perhaps no pattern at all; it was possible the organisms reacted to their environment and altered their methods accordingly. Thus, large cities tended to be silenced immediately, most or all of their citizens being infected and transformed within forty-eight hours. Outlying towns and rural areas, perhaps because of a lack of common sewage and water systems, were affected less rapidly. Spread of the plague to these areas appeared to proceed through animal and insect vectors as well as direct human contact.
Infrared pictures taken by Landsats and spy satellites, processed and interpreted by countries like Japan and Great Britain, showed incipient changes even in the forests and waterways of North America.
Already, he felt like Michael Bernard no longer existed. He had been swallowed up in something larger and far more impressive, and now he was on display in a museum, tagged and curiously enough, able to talk back. Ex-neurosurgeon, male, once well-known and wealthy, not very active of late, caught in social whirl and with scads of money to spend from lecture tours, book royalties, appearances in motion pictures…
It seemed quite possible that Michael Bernard hadn’t existed for six years, having vanished sometime after he last applied scalpel to flesh, drill to skull.
He opened his eyes and saw the men and one woman in the chambers.
“Dr. Bernard.” The woman was trying to attract his attention, apparently for the third or fourth time.
“Yes?”
“Is it true that you are at least in part to blame for this disaster?”
“No, not directly.”
“Indirectly?”
“There was no way I could have foreseen the consequences of other peoples’ actions. I am not psychic.”
The woman’s face was visibly flushed, even behind the three layers of glass. “I have—or had—a daughter and a sister in the United States. I am from France, yes, but I was born in California. What has happened to them? Do you know?”
“No, Madame, I do not.”
The woman shrugged Paulsen-Fuchs’ hands away and shouted, “Will it never end? Disaster and death, scientists– responsible, you are all responsible! Will it—” And she was hustled from the viewing chamber. Paulsen-Fuchs raised his hands and shook his head. The two chambers quickly emptied and he was left alone.
And since he was nothing, nobody, that meant that when he was alone, there was nothing there at all.
Nothing but the microbes, the noocytes, with their incredible potential, biding their time… unrealized.
Waiting to make him more than he had ever been.
22
The lights went out on the fourth day—in the morning, just after she awoke. She put on her designer jeans (from the Salvation Army thrift store) and her best bra and a sweater, took out her windbreaker from the closet behind the stairs, and stepped out into the daylight. No longer blessed, she thought. No longer desirable to the devil or anybody. “My luck’s running out.” she said aloud.
But she had food, and the water was still running. She considered her situation for a moment and decided she wasn’t that badly off. “Sorry, God,” she said, squinting at the sky.
Across the street, the houses were completely draped with mottled brown and white sheets that glistened like skin or leather in the sun. The trees and iron railings were hung with tatters of the same stuff. The houses on her side were starting to be overgrown, too.
It was time to move on. She wouldn’t be spared for long.
She packed food into boxes and stacked the boxes in the basket. The gas was still on; she cooked herself a fine breakfast with the last of the eggs and bacon, toasted bread over the fire as her mother had once taught her, spread it with the last of the butter and slathered it with jam. She finished four slices and went upstairs to pack a small overnight bag. Travel light, she thought. Heavy winter jacket and clothes, gun, boots. Wool socks from her brothers’ drawers. Gloves. Frontier time, pioneer time.
“I might be the last woman on Earth,” she mused. “I’ll have to be practical.”
The last thing into the cart, waiting at the foot of the stairs on the sidewalk, was the radio. She only played it a few minutes each night, and she had scrounged a boxful of batteries from Mithridates’. It should be useful for some time.
From the radio, she had learned that people were very worried, not just about Brooklyn, but about the entire United States, all the way to the borders, and Mexico and Canada beyond. Short wave news broadcasts from England talked about the silence, the “plague,” about air travelers being quarantined, and submarines and aircraft patrolling up and down the coast. No aircraft had as yet penetrated to the interior of North America, a very distinguished-sounding British commentator said, but secret satellite photographs, it was rumored, showed a nation paralyzed, perhaps dead.
Not me, Suzy thought. Paralyzed meant not moving. “I’ll move. Come look at me with your submarines and planes. I’ll be moving and I’ll be wherever I am.”
It was late afternoon as Suzy pushed the cart along Adams. Fog obscured the distant towers of Manhattan, allowing only pale silhouettes of the World Trade Center to rise above gray and white opacity. She had never seen fog so dense on the river.
Looking back over her shoulder, she saw great kitelike sails of brown and tan loft up in the wind over Cadman Plaza. Williamsburgh Savings Bank was sheathed along its 500-foot height with brown, no white this time, like a skyscraper wrapped for mailing. She turned down Tillary, heading for Flatbush and access to the bridge, when she thought how much she looked like a bag lady.
She had always been afraid of becoming a bag lady. She knew sometimes people with problems like hers couldn’t find places to live, so they lived on the streets.
She wasn’t afraid of that now. Everything was different. And the thought tickled her sense of humor. A bag lady in a city covered with brown paper bags. It was very funny but she was too tired to laugh.
Any kind of company would have been welcome—bag lady, cat, bird. But nothing moved except the brown sheets.
She pushed the cart up Flatbush, stopping to sit on a bus bench and rest, getting up and moving on. She took Kenneth’s heavy jacket from the cart and slipped it over her shoulders; evening was closing and the air was becoming quite chilly. “I’m going to sing now,” she told herself. Her head was full of lots of rhythms and rock beats, but she couldn’t find a tune. Pulling the cart up the steps to the bridge walkway, one step at a time, the cart lurching and the undercarriage scraping, a tune finally popped into her head, and she began humming the Beatles’ “Michelle,” recorded before she was born. “Michelle, ma belle,” was the only part of the lyric she remembered, and she sang that out between pulls and gasps.