Blood dripped from his gloves as his hands formed enthusiastic fists. I was terrified.
The girl with vitiligo dogged me through sheets of rain as I rushed along the far shanties to the vehicles. She had been at me all night. “You are leaving,” she said, alarmed by all the movement inside the camp. “We will go away now, Docteur. You will not leave me here to die.”
I stopped finally, the rain smashing at my hood. I turned to her and set my feet in the mud of the narrow walkway, and heard her plead once more. “La pluie, ça pue la mort.” The rain, it stinks of death. I then grabbed her suddenly with both gloved hands, one on her neck, the other covering her mouth. Her eyes fluttered wide with surprise and I propelled her around to the shaded rear of a shanty, thrusting her up against the metal wall. She was squirming in my grasp, trying to speak. She was trying to breathe. I saw the rain falling in the inches between our faces, smearing my mask and breaking like bits of glass over her nose and lips — and then returned to my senses, and at once let her go.
I stepped back. I looked at my suit gloves and they were clean; I had just come from a formalin soaking. If not for that I would certainly have infected her. “Murder,” I mumbled, huffing inside my stale suit, mad with despair and frustration and the unforgiving rain. She regained her breath and came at me undaunted, begging to be saved, her pink-stained hands pulling at my wet rubber chest. “No,” I told her, each time with less conviction.
“Stop,” I said finally, seizing her thin wrists and holding her arms fast. The downpour rang off the metal roof of the shanty as I scrutinized her clear, desperate eyes. She looked so small and young in the rain. “Wait,” I said. “Wait here.”
I moved under the branches behind the shanties to the road barrier and quickly disinfected. The seventeen asymptomatics’ blood samples had come back dirty — all except hers. Remarkably, for someone living in the tropics of central Africa, she had been demonstrably free of any viral infection as of noon that day. I was beginning to think that perhaps I had stumbled upon Peter Maryk’s immunological equal.
In my duffel bag in the trunk of the Pinzgauer I dug out my blue thermos and unscrewed the jar top. Dry ice steamed out. I had included with my provisions one 2-cc ampule of PeaMar4, just to have on hand, just in case.
The glass ampule containing the golden sera slid into my hand. The bottle was small and cool and smoking in the heat. I took one of the last remaining clean hypodermics and hurried back.
She met me as I approached. I showed her the hypo and instructed her to make a fist with her left hand and clench her left biceps — “Like this” — with her right. Fumblingly I drew the immunoserum into the barrel.
“The cure,” she said brightly.
“No,” I said. “But this will help to protect you.”
I braced her arm at the shoulder, then paused with the needle just over her skin. I looked again into her eyes. They were clear, and the trust I saw in them was overwhelming.
I jabbed the needle into her biceps. She looked away but did not grimace or call out in pain, and when it was over she released her fist, slowly, and then her hand. She smiled and flexed her arm, gently rubbing the puncture spot. She looked eager and thankful and suddenly quite lovely, and it thrilled me, and I knew then beyond any doubt that I had made the correct decision.
“Now run,” I said. “Down along the river, beyond the lake. And never come back here.”
She touched the fabric of my chest. “But I am going with you.”
I grabbed her other arm beneath the shoulder. “No,” I said. Her strewn, dripping hair made her look petulant, and I shook her roughly, once. “If you want to live, go now. If you want to die — stay.”
I released her, and after a moment she smiled at me admiringly, and again I hated her. She was like a stray that followed closest when kicked. “If you tell me to do it,” she said proudly, “I will.” It was as though her blind trust in me were her thanks. I turned and started back toward the mall. “I will go now, Docteur,” I heard her say behind me, her proud voice drowning in the rain. “I will go.”
I went around the corner of the shanty and kept walking.
Their sunken faces stared up at us through the rain, a silent, staring chorus. It was too late for anger and too early yet for regret. I tried to imagine the cymbal crash of immolation and the waves of orange flame, and their drawn faces flaring up, the diseased skin blackening and melting back, and their final revelation: “This is why the doctors abandoned us.”
The air force helicopter rose out over the river and the waterfall beyond, pulling away from the hazy clearing and the shrinking pink forms of the flamingos, higher and higher. I looked hard for the girl with vitiligo, as though I might see her there, waving good-bye.
The window was cool against my bared forehead. PCR lymphatic tests had confirmed each of us infection-free, and we seven sat strapped into our seats: malnourished, clinically exhausted, rocking lifelessly with the motion of the military helicopter climbing through the rain. We had shed our contact suits, leaving them collapsed on the mud road with the vehicles and contaminated equipment like so much trash awaiting incineration. We were all finally free of the suits and yet no one could bring him- or herself to celebrate. My own skin felt just as constricting.
Viruses traditionally are named for their place of origin. Ebola River, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Marburg, Germany. Lhasa, Nigeria. Machupo River, Bolivia. Lyme, Connecticut, and Muerto Canyon, Navajo Nation, USA. I wondered what exception would be made when the place of origin no longer existed.
Peter was strapped in across from me, and I saw that the first stage of his cascade had begun. His sluggish half eyes watched me, his chest emptying and filling deeply. He roused himself awake like a drunk coming to in a strange chair, blinking lazily and licking his thin, red lips.
“Twenty-one days of quarantine on an aircraft carrier,” he mumbled. “Doesn’t seem so bad right about now.”
I saw then something in him that I had never seen before, or perhaps had seen but ignored as I tried to shape his deviance for the benefit of humanity: the monstrous aberrance of Peter’s genetic superiority. My eyes opened to his utter inhumanity.
He tipped forward and slurred a few parting words before succumbing to the cascade slumber. “The tumor of the world,” he said. “You know I was right.”
This was to be his apology. There are chapters to every life, though seldom are we aware at the time of a page being thumbed and turned. This was one of those uncommon occasions.
Zero
I wish my tale of Africa ended there. There is however one more incident I must relate, a brief sequence of events to which, at the time, I was not privy. Even now, with the keenness of hindsight and every fact of consequence available before me, this singular event remains the most strange.
Seven days following the razing of the camp, the rainy season resumed in earnest. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist with Rainforest Ecology Conservation International, was out on the last night of a five-day field expedition into the rain forests of northern Congo, having circled back to within thirty kilometers of the RECI reserve. The night jungle is a haunted place, as I had found, where no man should venture alone. I can picture Ridgeway stretched out on his back, the rain spattering against the roof of his narrow nylon tent, listening to a BBC World Service broadcast on his radio, reporting on the current political climate in the United States, his home.