Bobby Adair - Ebola K

Austin looked off in the direction he’d seen the shortwave radio antenna attached to a building in town. “I think—”

Mary-Margaret shook her head. “The real world isn’t like a Gilligan’s Island episode, Austin Cooper. Operating a shortwave radio isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. It’s not a telephone.”

With a tremendous effort, Margaux propped herself up on one elbow, held the position for a moment, and fell back on her pillow. “Oh, God.”

From where he sat on her cot, Austin looked down at Rashid and Benoit on their blankets on the floor and asked Margaux, “How are you doing?”

In her French accent she said, “That’s a stupid question.”

“I know. I’m being polite.”

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she told him.

“I know. I’m being polite.”

Margaux started to laugh, but it turned into a painful cough, and she rolled onto her side. “I feel like I’m dying.”

Austin put a gloved hand on her shoulder. “You’ll be okay.”

“That doesn’t mean anything coming from you.”

“Not medically.” Austin looked around the stinking ward. There was barely room to walk. The influx of patients throughout the day had filled most of the space. “It’s what people say to sick people.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” he answered. “It means I’ve nothing meaningful to say, but I hope you get better.”

“Why not say that ?”

“I hope you get better. When you’re sick, you’re kind of a bitch.” Austin smiled behind his mask.

Margaux smiled back. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Austin noticed reddish splotches on her face and arms.

“Is Benoit awake?” Margaux asked.

“He was up earlier.”

“Out of bed?”

Austin pointed at the door in the back of the ward. “I helped him to the outhouse.”

“Good. I’m glad he was up.”

“Yeah.” In truth, Benoit had barely made it. Austin had half carried him on the way back, but didn’t recall seeing a rash on Benoit’s skin at the time. Looking down at Benoit from his position on Margaux’s cot, Austin saw it now.

He’d seen those same splotches on the skin of others in the ward—others who were much worse off the Benoit or Margaux. They’d regurgitate and soil themselves and lie in their excretions. Half delirious, too fatigued, or in too much pain to do anything about it or even ask for help.

Once Nurse Mary-Margaret had put him to work, he started by helping to change the bed sheets under a young woman, one of the first to arrive, down at the end of the ward. She seemed to have lost all control of her bodily functions. Her temperature had set her blotched skin afire. Her blood-filled eyes rolled around, unable to focus on anything. Her vomitus was bloody and black. Her gums and nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. She moaned whenever touched.

Austin didn’t know much about death, but he was sure that girl was dying.

Heavy slow breathing from Margaux told Austin that she had fallen asleep.

“Hey.” It was Rashid.

Austin looked down at Rashid and grinned behind his mask. “I thought you were dead.”

“Is—is this the hospital?”

“Yeah.” Rashid drew in a long, painful sounding breath. “I feel terrible.”

“Yeah. You look like shit, too.”

“I’m thirsty.”

Austin stood up a little too fast and felt light-headed. It was time for more aspirin. “I’ll get you some water.”

A couple of large white plastic barrels were on tables against one wall. They’d been brought in a few hours earlier along with a case of disposable cups. The disposable cups were a good thought, but unless there were lots more somewhere close by, they’d run out before the end of the day.

Austin filled a cup and brought it to Rashid, who drank slowly at first and then gulped.

“Thank you,” said Rashid.

“I’ll get you some more in a minute.”

“How did I get here?” Rashid asked.

“I carried you,” answered Austin. “You wouldn’t wake up this morning.”

“So it was this morning. I was almost worried that I’d been out for a week or something.”

Benoit squirmed, but didn’t wake up.

Austin said, “No. Just today.”

Rashid reached down and felt his pocket.

Austin said, “I took your phone and called your brother, Najid. At least I think it was him. How many brothers do you have?”

“Just Najid.”

“Okay,” said Austin. “He’ll be here in a while.”

“He shouldn’t come.”

“I know.” Austin shrugged. “Tell him that.”

“I will. Where is my phone?”

Austin leaned over Rashid and fetched the phone. It was lying on the floor above Rashid’s head.

Rashid didn’t raise his hand to take the phone from Austin, but instead stared up at Austin for a few long moments. “Is it Ebola?”

“They’re not sure. Nurse Mary-Margaret said it might be typhoid.”

“That’s great.”

Austin chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’ll bet you never thought you’d be happy to have typhoid.”

“So they’re sure, then?”

Austin shook his head. “They don’t know yet. They think because so many people got sick so fast, it can’t be Ebola.”

“Why don’t they test?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they did but the results aren’t back yet.”

Paul Cooper wasn’t the worrying type, not even close to it. Neither did he wear rose-colored glasses. He saw himself as a pragmatist. But one worry that did lurk in his little closet of childhood bogeymen was Ebola. He was a kid with a paper route when the 1976 outbreak hit the news. Every day when he folded his papers prior to delivering them on his bike, he read the headlines. He saw frightening stories of bleeding, suffering, and of whole African villages wiped out. And an American media, in the infancy of its sensationalist tendencies, taught him a new phrase for fear—hemorrhagic fever.

In those days, nobody knew what caused Ebola. Nobody knew how it was transmitted. There was speculation about something in the water or the air—an old contagious evil that had been hiding in the jungle’s damp shadows, awakened.

Paul clearly remembered sitting on the living room floor one evening while his parents and grandparents watched the TV with silent mouths and wide eyes. Ebola was the kind of disease that scared the shit out of everybody.

But Africa was a far away place in those days. The deepest jungles of Zaire were even further away. For a disease that killed everybody , there seemed no way it could make its way out of the jungle in a jeep on a rutted dirt road, onto some bush pilot’s little plane, onto a commercial flight to Europe, and eventually to America. The world wasn’t as thoroughly interconnected by jets in those days as it was going to become. Anyone unlucky enough to be carrying the Ebola virus in his blood was likely never to make it out of the jungle alive.

Forty years later, things were different. Anyone sitting in a thatch-roofed African hut infested with Ebola could make his way out of the jungle and onto an airplane that would drop him in any of America’s busiest airports within twenty-four hours.

As paperboys do, Paul eventually finished school. He went to college, married, had kids of his own, and eventually got divorced; a regular kid who grew into a regular American life. As life passed, that scary disease’s name came up occasionally in the news, and just like that other scary word from his childhood—thermonuclear war—it always caught his attention and tugged at his fears.

So when the Ebola outbreak came up in the news that summer, Paul was aware and felt a little remiss. The disease had been spreading from Sierra Leone to Guinea and Liberia—West African countries—for months before enough people had died to make it newsworthy. By then, it was the largest Ebola outbreak on record.