“When was the last time they were here?” Lyle asked the chieftain’s son. “The pure breeds?”
“What are you asking?” Michael said.
“Ask him, please.”
He doesn’t remember.
“A few weeks?”
“Yes.”
“What did they wear?”
Lyle listened to the translation of Swahili to the Cushitic tongue and back, then to English.
“Suits, like he said.”
“Dark skin?”
“Not this dark.”
“Did they leave you anything? A way to get in touch.”
No.
Just the warning.
“Peño, what are you doing?”
“Taking a nap.”
“In the truck.”
“Good a place as any.”
She stared at him.
“I’ve never in my life seen you act like this,” she said.
He half smiled at her, distant. “Lyle,” she said, “say something.”
He was sitting in the last row of the safari truck. He stared at her. He shook his head, and she could tell he’d traveled to some distant place in his head. He reached behind his head and pulled out a white shirt he’d used as a pillow. He lifted it into the air, like a flag, and he waved it. Surrender.
A day later, their airplane landed from JFK. Michael had gotten off in New York hardly able to hide his frustration. Lyle had given him nothing, bubkes, well, other than his personal symptoms of emotional withdrawal. Just turned into a fucking log. Except when he shrugged and asked for a beer. Before he’d gone totally dark, he’d also told Michael, cryptically, that the villagers didn’t need a doctor but a better police force.
“I’m realizing I don’t speak Dr. Martin,” Michael said to Melanie, trying to be as diplomatic as possible.
She didn’t share Michael’s sense of decorum. “I don’t speak asshole, either,” she said, right in front of Lyle as a taxi driver spitting chew out the window spirited them past looming Kilimanjaro in swirling winds to the airport. “If you want my interpretation, I think Lyle thinks this wasn’t caused organically.”
“Meaning what?”
“He thinks it’s a man-made virulence. Someone poisoned these people.”
It was exactly what Lyle thought. This was chemical warfare. Someone had come in here and given this tribe an intensified flu, maybe something even using CRISPR, genetically hacked viruses meant to do an end around immune systems and traditional treatments. It would explain the attack of young, strong members of the tribe, the threat by outside forces, the visitation of this virus absent any clear catalyst or patient zero and in a fairly clean community, well kept. It would explain, most of all, Lyle’s gut feeling. Maybe even some government had supported this experimentation. It would be revelatory, of course, also solvable. He scribbled down several courses of action, one of which would almost surely confine this and put it to rest.
“It’s absurd,” Michael said before he left Melanie and Lyle in their Air France seats to take his own. “He sounds like one of those nuts in Brazil with Zika.” Conspiracy theorists in Latin America had spread rumors nearly as virulent as the virus itself that the Zika-carrying mosquitoes had been planted by angry British colonialists or one-worlders. “The dean was right,” Michael concluded. He didn’t finish the thought but it was clear enough: he should’ve sought someone else’s counsel. Lyle hadn’t really tried; he’d mailed it. Lyle was just a good storyteller more interested in applause than answers, or maybe something more insidious than that—a malicious fraud. How had he gotten such a reputation? On the flight, Melanie willed herself to go to sleep. She talked again to Lyle when the landing gear came down to touch down in San Francisco.
“Counseling, Lyle. You’re in or I’m out.”
He studied her face. The water retained in her rosy cheeks.
“You’re pregnant, Melanie.”
“Shut up, Lyle.”
He looked down so he couldn’t watch the wave of revelation spread over her face. He’d suspected for a week or more. He suspected she didn’t know. How could he know before her? How did he ever understand these things? It started with a sensation, like an itch, and it made its way from his body to his brain to his consciousness.
“No, Lyle, it’s not…” She stopped and her blue eyes turned steely. “I’m pregnant? I’m pregnant!” Her utter disbelief transformed quickly into wonder. Lyle so often was right about things like this. Could he see it before she knew? “Why did you let me go?” she demanded. No words to capture her betrayal.
“Maybe the better question is why you went.”
The tears leaked from her crimson-tinged eyes and one dripped off her chin. She had no strength to wipe them away.
“What’s happened to you, Lyle?”
Fourteen
Jackie and Denny hit the Nevada border just after two on a bright Saturday afternoon in Denny’s Tesla. They’d taken the “scenic” route, Denny joked, which meant driving the flatlands east of the Bay Area, skirting the more populated route to the north, and taking two-lane highways where Denny got to test out the “autonomous driver” mode on his Tesla. The car’s new software drove itself while Denny told Jackie more about Lantern, the project they were studying in the desert. With his hands free, he could even show her slides on the seventeen-inch touch screen in the Tesla, which he’d hooked up to his iPad.
At the Nevada border and truck weigh station, they slowed at the request of a soldier who waved them to the side.
“An army checkpoint?” Jackie asked.
“I assume because of what happened last month.”
Three weeks earlier, the army had raided the home of a family in the Big Smoky Valley to the east. The family’s ranch was on federal land to be used for military exercises, but the parents had refused multiple requests and legal maneuverings to get them to move. They holed up on the property with a veritable cache of munitions, including a grenade launcher, and declared themselves sovereign. On Instagram, they posted a sign of their twin nine-year-olds, a boy and a girl, draped in the American flag, holding AK-47s. The army assault, pressed by manifold interests, including concerns about the children, used nonlethal gases and took back the house.
Three days later, in retaliation, two men attacked the guard post at the military base in Hawthorne. They killed a soldier and injured three others, before they were killed.
At the border, the grim-looking soldier looked into the Tesla’s trunk and waved on Denny and Jackie.
Martial law, Jackie thought. She said, “You never said why here—in Hawthorne.”
He explained how Nevada was about the most business-friendly place in the world. Low taxes, lax regulations. Totally hassle free, he said, sounding mostly kidding, but not totally. “In Silicon Valley, we spend more for an hour of a lawyer’s time than we do to rent an office for the month.”
Jackie listened to Denny on two different levels: on one, she was getting basic information, and on the other she was assessing whether he was being straight with her, if she could still have faith in him, follow his direction. The lines beneath her eyes told how much sleep she’d lost, some nights making lists of the evidence in his favor and against. She’d let him lead her from wilderness, pull her from two decades in shadows—and what if she’d been wrong to do that all along?
“Jackie?”
“Huh?”
“You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
“Not really.”
Another long stretch of road and silence.
“You spent much time in the hinterlands?” Denny asked.
“Did some backpacking, after college.”