The pioneering enthusiasm he had arrived with eight months before was by then gone. He had journeyed to the central African rain forest in order to archive and preserve specimens of the tens of millions of uncharacterized species of tropical flora, before population demands and the big boot of human development stamped them out forever. But that night he was facing the futility of his efforts; millions of rare life forms were being willfully exterminated around him, and he was reexamining the merits of his crusade. What was the use, after all, of trying to salvage a representative sample of a species not strong enough to survive on its own? How much should be left to nature? And what of the senselessness of naming something just as it ceased to exist?
The fact that he was even deigning to entertain these questions must have depressed young Ridgeway all the more. The earth was suffocating worldwide under the weight of advancing Homo sapiens, and that night, as he lay alone in the pounding rain of the jungle, he must have felt himself its only witness.
Case in point: the jets he had heard streaking across the jungle sky seven nights before; he had reported them. And the black rain, which he at first thought was volcanic ash cycling back through the biosphere; he had reported that too. His reports went out over the airwaves among a million bursts of static, answered by no one, slipping the earth’s orbit and pulsing into the galaxies, a lone human voice of protest.
The system had since purged itself, and the rain that night fell again sweet and clear. I see him reaching up and unzipping the tent fold, letting in some of the perfumed forest air, the scent of his smothered cooking fire, its lingering smoke. There would have been faint light from above, threads of silver angling off the waxing moon through the jeweled rain. Perhaps by the light of one of those lunar strands did he notice the branches bobbing in the trees across from his tent. There was nothing unusual about a creature moving through the night jungle — until the creature emerged from the trees on two legs, walking erect. Ridgeway then sat up, repositioning himself to peer through the zipper folds and through the rain.
It was a human figure, too large to be a Pygmy, slipping from the cover of the trees and moving across a muddy path to a tree of surfboard-sized leaves.
Maybe Ridgeway thought it was someone trying to steal something from his camp. Did he turn up the volume on his radio, in hopes of scaring off the intruder? Or did he simply struggle into a plastic poncho and step out into the rain?
“Yes?” he called out. “Hello?”
Not until the silhouette emerged from the cover of the leaves would he have known that it was a female. Ridgeway knew little of the local dialects, and no French, but he was a trusting soul, with plenty of food to share, and would have welcomed friendly company of any sort.
She started across the camp toward him, striding through the strands of silver light, and Ridgeway saw then that she was nude. Her body was young and firm, with branch scratches and other irregular marks covering much of her dark flesh. She walked right up to him, breaching even that radius of personal space generally respected by strangers, breathing deeply, as though after a long run. Her dark nipples brushed against the chest of his poncho with each gust. He opened his mouth to speak then, to ask her what she wanted, and her lips closed on, his in a firm kiss. She kissed him full-mouthed and sensually, without otherwise touching his body, and after the initial shock, Ridgeway’s neck and back relaxed and he accommodated her passion without resistance. Perhaps he opened his eyes just once, buoyed by his raging pulse, and found her eyes were open too, but dark, her pupils flat and staring. Her tongue then swished the enamel of his front teeth — strangely cold, in his limited experience, colder than any other tongue he had ever tasted — and their lips parted and she stood facing him as before.
He saw more clearly then the dull glow behind her eyes, the thick drops of rain breaking upon her nose and cheeks, and the vague discoloration of her flesh. It was vitiligo, though this meant nothing to Ridgeway. And then at once she turned and started away. She walked not quickly, not even purposefully, the bright glints of moonlight illuminating her buttocks, the sheen of her shoulder blades, and the dimpled small of her curved back, crossing through the rain back into the trees.
She would wander the jungle in this same stupor for some ten more hours before sitting down to rest against a dead tree in the middle of a wide clearing and succumbing to a series of swift, violent, massive strokes. Creatures of the jungle came forward to nibble on her corpse, but did not like what they tasted, and none of them made it back out of the clearing before failing dead. The insects that fed upon the dead creatures also died, so many carcasses cooking under the bright, virus-killing sun. The animals deemed it a sacred place, and all stayed away. The girl’s skeleton still sits there, partially intact, slumped next to the rotted tree, its skull fixed in an empty, meaningless grin.
As for Ridgeway, he ran after her that night, but no deeper than the first few forbidding trees. He returned and found her footprints in the soft mud of his camp, small and faint and disappearing in the hard rain — then gasped out a nervous laugh. She had been real enough, though there was precious little consolation in that. A beautiful woman of the jungle, exotic and nude, had walked out of the trees and kissed him once, as though delivering a passionate message dispatched from the heart of the rain forest, then disappeared again without a word. He shook his head underneath his poncho hood, and smiled.
He looked up and found the swelling moon above the thinning canopy. The warm rain washed his face, smelling of the sky and of the fleeting bare feet of summer, and he stood there, the blood rush still tingling in his veins, perhaps dreaming of home.
This was Patient Zero.
My Own Story, Half-Told
Another page turned.
Stockholm, six years later. December tenth, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, and traditionally the inauguration of Nobel Week, the end of a day that should have been the brightest yet of my thirty-seven years. The diploma and solid gold medal presented me by His Majesty the king of Sweden at the award ceremony at the Stockholms Konserthus lay securely in the safe behind the reception desk in the hotel lobby, while I lay seven floors above, deep in a strange bed like a heavy stone set upon a soft pillow. And for the first time in a long time, I was not alone.
Following clinical trials of varying degrees of success, and in light of Peter Maryk’s increasing disdain for the project, I eventually directed our PeaMar research exclusively toward manufacturing a pure, whole blood alternative. The result, PeaMar23, was a certified disease-free, hemoglobin-based, synthetic blood substitute with a storage shelf life of nearly three times the forty-two-day limit of organic human blood.
Coming at a time when worldwide inventories of clean blood were reaching a critical level, news of the discovery was hailed internationally as a triumph on the level of Salk’s polio vaccine and, unexpectedly, made me something of a celebrity. PeaMar23 was currently in use in every health clinic in every province of every country in the world, all mass-produced in a plant in Chamblee, north of Atlanta, known as BDC Building Twenty, the Blood Services Section.
For this Peter Maryk and I shared the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. My acceptance speech at that day’s ceremony had been well received (The governing principle of my professional life has been that we at the BDC must never let technology overshadow basic human care... that we continue to reach out to the afflicted, if only with a gloved hand... that we be scientists second, doctors first...), though as I returned to my seat, flushed with relief amid the applause filling the concert hall, I felt that something was missing.