It turned out that Jill, the receptionist, hadn’t shown up for work—phoned in sick—but Annie was at the office, sitting in Reception fielding calls, mainly cancelled appointments. She put down the receiver and transferred queries to the service for an hour so she could break for lunch; Matt brought up food from the first-floor coffee shop—which was understaffed. Plastic-wrapped salads and ham sandwiches on white. Annie Gates picked at hers, eyes distantly focused. “Strange day,” she mused.
Matt told her about Cindy Rhee, but the story felt distant, curiously immaterial, even as he told it.
Annie frowned. Wrinkle of brow and purse of lips. Trying to fathom all this but meeting some internal resistance. “Maybe that’s why nobody’s keeping their appointments. They’re all—well, better.”
Poor Dr. Wheeler. We’re putting you out of business.
Maybe not better, Matt thought. Maybe sicker.
He told Annie what Jim Bix had said about foreign bodies in the blood of his hospital samples, in his own blood. He hadn’t intended to tell her this, at least not yet—hadn’t wanted to worry her needlessly. But she nodded. “I heard something about it at the hospital. Had lunch with a staff nurse from the path lab. She was scared spitless. So was I, by the time she finished. So I called the hematology resident at the Dallas hospital where I interned. He didn’t want to talk about it, but when I told him what I’d heard he pretty much confirmed it.”
So we were keeping this from each other, Matt thought. It was like an O. Henry story. How many other people were in on this secret?
He said, “That means it’s not local.”
“No. Are you surprised?”
“No.”
“The CDC must have known about it at least as long as Jim Bix.” She sipped her Pepsi. “I guess the clamps came down hard. There hasn’t been a hint of it in the papers. I suppose the thinking is, why worry people? A disease with no symptoms, a disease with no epidemiology because everybody already has it—so why start a panic?”
“Surely they can’t keep it a secret much longer.”
“Maybe they won’t have to.”
He felt enclosed in a dome of feverish tranquility. Part of him was conducting this conversation quite reasonably; another part was encapsulated, silent, but frightened by what Annie had said. These were thoughts he had not yet allowed himself.
A distant, dreamy note crept into her voice. “If this infection has a purpose—and I think it does—we’ll all know pretty soon what it is.”
He gave her a sharp look. “What makes you think it has a purpose?”
“Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “Don’t you think that?”
Not a question he wanted to answer.
“Annie, can I ask you something? You said when you heard about this from your friend you were scared. At the time.”
“Yes.”
“But not now?”
Her frown deepened. “No… not now. I’m not scared now.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, Matt.” She regarded him solemnly across the remains of lunch. “I don’t honestly know.”
He spent the afternoon cleaning up paperwork and attending a single patient: a thirty-year-old housewife keeping an appointment to monitor her blood pressure. Yes, she was sticking to her diet. Yes, she was taking her medication.
Her pressure was a textbook-normal 120 over 80 despite a degree and a half of fever. She seemed absentminded but she smiled as she left. Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.
Matt pulled his chair to the window and watched shade and light mark time in the street beyond.
We’re being sedated.
The town was quiescent. Every motion seemed isolated, a unique event. A car crawled along the hot blacktop in slow motion. An elderly man, his collar open and his suitcoat over his shoulder, stepped out of the Bargain Cuts Uni-Sex Barber Shop and paused to run a bony hand across his stubbled head. Sunlight winked on windshields, softened road tar, and lifted haze from the blank and distant ocean.
I should be terrified, Matt thought. And I’m not. And that should be terrifying, too. But it wasn’t.
Sedation. What else to call this clinical calm? We should be screaming. We should be outraged. We should feel violated. Because this was—
Was what?
The end of the world?
Yes, Matt thought. Probably the end of the world. That was probably what this was.
At three o’clock a courier came upstairs with a folder of test results from the private med lab on the third floor. The blood results might be skewed, but apparently they could still sort out gonadotropin from a few CCs of urine. Matt gave the dossier a quick perusal. Then he phoned Lillian Bix and told her she was pregnant.
They closed the empty office at four.
“I walked to work,” Annie said. “Maybe you can drive me back to your place.” Matt looked blank. “Your dinner party. Remember?”
He almost laughed. The idea was ludicrous. How was he supposed to conduct a dinner party? Serve salt peanuts and play “Nearer My God to Thee?”
Annie smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. Some cancellations phoned in this morning. Check your memo pad. There are probably more on your machine at home. You can call it off if you want… I’ll get dinner at a restaurant.”
He shook his head. “No. Annie, I want you to come home with me. But there might not be anybody else.”
“I know.”
“Nothing to celebrate.”
“I know, Matt. Maybe we can have a drink. Watch the lights.”
“I’d like that,” Matt said.
She was right about the party, of course. Everybody had canceled—most citing the flu—except for Jim and Lillian Bix, who showed up with a bottle of wine.
The mood was not celebratory, though Lillian had announced her pregnancy to Jim and Jim announced it to Annie. It was obvious from their slightly dazed expressions that his friends felt the way Matt did: fenced off, somehow, from the significance of all these strange events. “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—T. S. Eliot, if Matt recalled correctly. The phrase echoed in his head as the four of them fumbled around the kitchen, improvising dinner, while Rachel watched a TV newscast in the next room. The President, Rachel said, had canceled his Friday night speech. But everything was quiet in Washington.
Later, Matt switched off the air conditioning and the adults adjourned to the backyard deck. Lawn chairs in a cooling breeze, wine in stemmed glasses. Sunset faded; the first stars emerged. The breeze swayed the big Douglas fir at the back of the yard and Matt listened to the sound of its branches stirring, as gentle in the dusk as the rustling of a woman’s skirt. “My God,” he said, “it’s—quiet”
Jim looked quizzical. “What do they say in the movies? Too quiet.”
“Seriously,” Matt said. “Listen. You can hear the trees.”
Now they crooked their heads at the evening and grew attentive.
“I can hear the frogs,” Annie marveled. “From the river, I guess. My gosh. Way down the valley.”
“And that ringing sound,” Lillian said. “I know what that is! The flagpole over at the elementary school. I walk by there some mornings. The rope bangs against the staff when the wind blows. It always reminds me of a bell.”
A distant, random tolling. Matt heard it, too. Jim said, “Is all this so odd?”
“Friday night,” Matt said. “The highway runs along the river. You can usually hear the traffic. Usually nothing but. People going to the movies, guys out at the bars, maybe a lumber truck roaring by. It’s the kind of sound you can put out of your mind, but you notice it when it’s gone. There’s always some kind of noise up here, even after midnight. A train whistle. A siren once in a while. Or—”