Lyle closed the paper. Maybe he was better off in retirement; the frickin’ human race.
Twenty-four hours later, Lyle landed back in San Francisco. He felt for the most part bewildered. He also wondered if his use of all those sleeping pills and the recreational booze had truly begun to eat away at his cognition.
Back in his studio apartment, he listened to the sounds of twentysomethings eating barbecue on the patio across the street and vowed he’d stop drinking for a day or two. He unpacked what little he’d taken. Put the Nebraska album on his old turntable and sat down on a beanbag chair, trying to shake the feeling he’d been put through the spin cycle in a dryer. It would go away in a few hours, he told himself, looking to put the whole damn failed experiment of going to Colorado behind him.
That’s when he found the note in his back pocket.
Thirty-Four
At first, Lyle assumed it must have been something he’d written in an altered state and decided to ignore it. After all, it made no sense. He tossed it in the tin pail he’d gotten at the garage sale where he met the last person he’d slept with. Her name was Papyrus and she was at the garage sale exploring an old fishbowl but, really, it became clear, had stopped while walking by to explore Lyle. Extremely nice, extremely sexual, woman, and young, which is how Lyle thought of anyone in their late twenties. It lasted three nights, until Lyle had, as much as he could through a sexual encounter, exorcized his fury at Melanie.
That was two years ago, give or take, and the garage sale remnant had given him a memento and symbol for his ugly existence. He was throwing his life away, everything he’d believed in or wanted. Every time he looked at that damn thing, he thought of the woman he’d slept with, nice enough for sure, but decidedly not Melanie, and his life decidedly not the one he’d invented and that he’d been driven from—mostly by himself.
Now, he realized, reclining in his aging blue beanbag chair, he again faced a fork in the road, one he felt like he’d already taken. A week ago, he set aside all his reticence and decided, finally, yes, he would attend the infectious disease conference and stick a toe into his former life. For the most part, he had told himself, it was because he needed the money. He couldn’t go on forever on dwindling expenses, even in a studio where the rent didn’t rise because he gave free medical counsel to the older woman who owned the building and lived on the top floor. There was more to his motivation than mere money. Little by little, he’d forgiven Melanie for having a one-night stand that, remarkably enough, produced offspring (or maybe it was more than a one-night stand but that’s what she claimed). And maybe the person he was forgiving was himself for having gotten so withdrawn in the first place that Melanie had wanted to feel some control over her life and lashed out. Maybe he had been sabotaging the whole thing. Could he blame her?
He blamed humanity. Lyle had learned and studied, trained and taught, all in the name of staving off disease and infection. And humans thanked him by killing themselves off. How many patients had he seen who put themselves into perilous positions with their own behavior? Even when it wasn’t his direct charge, he’d wander through the hospital and see the diabetic who had eaten himself into disease, the car wreck victim who had texted herself off the bridge, the gunshot victim who had fired first.
When he got the invite to Steamboat, he at first dismissed it. But the organization, the woman who ran it, stroked his ego and hit the right buttons. Maybe that had been a cruel joke, too. He’d have to go back and investigate and call them, find out if he fucked up the date somehow or they duped him or what. It really was strange. But, regardless, the trip, having failed, usurped by bad planning and a miasma of strange and hazy memories from a distant mountain town, put him in the position of having to get up some gumption again. If he was going to get his ass out of this dwindling situation, he was going to have to make it happen. Where was that energy going to come from?
He fell asleep in the chair and woke up in the middle of the night with a crook in his neck. He ignored it and walked over to the trash bin and pulled from the refuse the crumpled piece of paper. He recognized his own handwriting:
Beware channelopathy/seizure pandemic. Google? You’re not imagining.
Over and over he read it. He knew it meant something, just knew, and he had no idea what.
He finally got to sleep at four in the morning and dreamed vividly of playing a game of laser tag in the snow. The dreamy sleep left Lyle feeling grateful—it had been a long time since he’d been visited by such rest, without assistance—and his exhaustion lifted. That morning, at the coffee shop around the corner from his house, he turned on his vastly outdated Mac and read the news and then succumbed to curiosity and looked up channelopathy. His research confirmed what little he remembered. Channelopathies are diseases that can lead to brief periods of paralysis and are associated with problems in the ion channels, which are gatekeepers of cells.
Already, he was baffled, partly because he’d exhausted his knowledge on the subject.
He surfed around and reminded himself that an ion is an atom or molecule that is electrically charged, either positively or negatively, depending on the mismatch inside of it between electrons and protons. Ions like sodium and potassium would flow through the openings in the cell, creating tiny but ultimately powerful electrical impulses that stimulate electrical pulses in the body to fire muscles and nerves.
Lyle looked up from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. This was mind-bending stuff, more the bailiwick of physicists than doctors. Around him, he eyed a half-dozen fellow patrons buried in their laptops and phones and then returned to his own.
As he read across various websites, feeling very much vexed, at least one thing did become clear to him: why he’d written seizure next to channelopathy. In fact, these were two very different ideas, but they both did implicate electrical pulses and both could involve temporary paralysis. Both could lead to acute memory loss. In the case of seizure, the electrical storm could complicate or even erase the memory for up to six hours prior to the event.
And neither of them, at least on its face, had anything to do with pandemic.
He did a search for “pandemic” and “channelopathy,” and another using “epidemic” and then matching the various words with “seizure” and came up empty.
He combined the searches with tech, and tech-born, and empty, empty, empty.
What the hell was this note in his pocket?
He stood up to leave and was bumped into by a woman walking with a coffee in her hand and her face looking down at the cell phone in her other hand. She spilled her coffee. “I’m sorry,” she said, without even fully looking up. “No problem,” Lyle said, finding it mostly funny. Ever the clinician, he noticed the swelling red around her nose. She had a cold. It left him with an idea that he didn’t put a fine point on until a step or two later. Absently, he sat again at a bench and fired up his laptop and confirmed what he’d been thinking: channelopathies sometimes involved an autoimmune attack. This idea, autoimmunity, was much more in Lyle’s wheelhouse and he understood better what he was reading. Sometimes, the body’s own defenders would attack the body itself, as in diabetes or arthritis or other autoimmune disorders, and then become more dangerous than any foreign invader.