After the beach ball there was a set of fire irons, after the set of fire irons there was a baseball glove for Skip, and then a matching baseball glove for me, and then there was some new bedding for the divan in my office, and then there was a new set of beach towels, and then I ordered entire sets of compact disc recordings of various baroque composers, and then I ordered the great books as selected by professors at important national universities, with special attention to Heidegger and other Germans. When my wife, Helen, began to complain about the online ordering, I changed tactics and began ordering jewelry for her. First I ordered jewelry from Native American artisans in the Southwest, because my wife was very fond of the jewelry of that region, and when she began complaining further about having to drive down to the ferry dock to negotiate with the men in the freight office about the excessive room all my packages were taking up there (it was true, they were moving my packages around on pallets), I then began ordering items from Tiffany and other high-end retailers. All of this so that I could get more time here on the Internet to research germs.
Here were some of the germs that had begun to attract my attention. Brucellosis. Venezuelan equine encephalitis. African swine fever. Sandfly fever. Dengue fever. Yellow fever. Marburg virus. Foot-and-mouth disease. Bacillus anthracis. Rift Valley fever virus, Zagazig 501 strain. Rinderpest. Miscellaneous shellfish toxins, such as MSX. Dutch duck plague. Avian flu. Ebola fever. Hantavirus. Leishmaniasis. Heartwater. Bluetongue. Staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Serratia marcescens. Bacillus subtilis. Coxsackie B-5 virus, Louping ill, contagious ecthyma, Nairobi sheep disease, feline cytauxzoonosis.
I scoured the available databases for descriptions of how to weaponize these ailments. Had they hurdled the species barrier? Had some poor government worker been spat upon by an infected cow and then had himself necropsied like the rest of the nameless cows, goats, sheep, and rodents at the various laboratories? I waited for Helen to turn in. Each night, I waited until she cracked the spine of some dusty tome by Thackeray or Dickens, and then I got up, in my nightshirt and nightcap, and began to limp around the premises.
It was a large old house, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White in the 1920s according to the elegant rigors of their style. The porch was well-known as a gem of this sort. Since we were on a grassy knoll above the bay side, the wind whipped up like nowhere else. As I’ve said, our island is sweet and gentle and full of breathtaking views and lovely residences, but in the off-season the wind does stay on duty. You can imagine how this kind of island living used to drive men to distraction. Late at night, I listened to the winds, and I read about germs, about how these germs were being manufactured only six miles from here, despite demurrals from the Department of Agriculture, whose officials I knew well back when I was in the public sector. After all, the Centers for Disease Control had been under our jurisdiction. I knew that with one good explosion, air-dropped from the appropriate height, the PIADC would be dust. Then the millions of innocents on the South and North Forks, and here on our own little island, would be hemorrhaging within days.
With Rift Valley fever, you know, the hemorrhaging is through the eye socket. First you have the high fever, and then the hemorrhaging through the eye socket, and the blood clots in the lens, resulting in blindness in most cases. When President Eisenhower first rubber-stamped the initial experiments with Rift Valley fever, he was reported to have found solace in the fact that the bug was incapacitating but not fatal. That was before the Egyptian variant, Zagazig 501. Now it’s fatal.
You would be right to ask if I was lonely during these nights. When my wife called for me to come to bed, was I lonely, knowing what I knew? I am pleased to say that I am given to such Yankee optimism about things that I knew we could somehow prevent these dark machineries of death from reaching our shores. With my rather unsteady hands, I moved the cursor across the screen, turning up any online remark no matter how trivial or alarmist. I felt rather buoyed knowing that I could make sure that my wife and son would not develop painful ulcerous blisters on their mouths and hands that would then give way to harmful secondary infections, ultimately condemning them to anguished, quarantined deaths. Nor would they bleed from the eyes.
When I was done looking for leads, I inevitably checked the weather for the region. The fact that we had not had a major, category-five hurricane in some years did not mean that we could not have one now. And it was with a grim satisfaction that I recognized one night that there was a powerful category-four storm working its way up the coast. Having bypassed the Carolinas and Virginia Beach, the storm would likely be upon us within days. Of course, any such storm would serve as convenient cover for dark-complected persons. The Omega Force, according to the reports of elite government counterterrorist Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, awaited the hurricane, awaited the night, awaited the blizzard, awaited the war that breaks out elsewhere, awaited a major disturbance in the markets, awaited the Super Bowl, awaited the national holiday, awaited the religious festival, awaited the assassination, awaited any movement or weakness. The Omega Force waited for Plum Island to secure itself, waited for Plum Island to batten down its hatches, and then by amphibious assault in the thick of the storm, the Omega Force would come to liberate the island from the Capitalist running dogs. And the first thing it would do: free the animals.
By coincidence, the hurricane in question was called Helen.
I gummed my food. I ate soup and those small custardy yogurts that practically cried out gerontologist-approved. Knowing what I knew relegated me to a singular status, in which there was no one to whom I could talk, no one to whom I could turn. My two brothers died alone. The Van Deusens’ success in the world was matched only by their mute, solitary suffering in the personal realm. Neither one of them ever asked to see me before he was gone. No heroic measures were performed. These Van Deusens slipped from consciousness so quietly — as in the case of my brother Chalmers, the venture capitalist — that it was almost as if they’d never actually been conscious. Terrence, who inherited the mattress business, was lost in a hunting accident. He was doing what he loved to do, alone in a duck blind, and he simply didn’t turn up later in the day, having been struck by a stray bullet. They were gone, I was left, I was provided for, and here I was up in the attic.
I went for a walk before dawn. I think it was Monday. It might have been Thursday. One of my online purchases was a clam hoe. My wife considered this a reasonable therapeutic activity that I might take up in my dotage, looking for clams on the shore, clams that had not already been infected with a deadly shellfish toxin.
I had a rather unusual garb on that morning. I thought it rather jolly. I wore pressed white boxer shorts, slippers (ordered from L.L. Bean of Freeport, ME), and my purple dressing gown, which was a princely robe. It had a bright yellow lining. I thought of waking Skip, who still slept in the adorable fetal curl of a young child. The wind was howling and beckoning to me, and out I went into it, with my cane and my clam hoe.
When I reached the edge of the sea, which even on the bay side was quite rough, I encountered the former lobsterman Ed Thorne. I suppose I had been expecting him. I had no idea when it was going to take place, the transfer of dossiers, what week, what month. But I was prepared. Ed was just where he was supposed to be, wearing foul-weather gear of the sort you might find in a Winslow Homer painting. We exchanged pleasantries. I asked after his family, whom I had always liked. Then I said, “Ed, are you here with information?”