Peter May - Snakehead

There were around two dozen of them, and she had no idea which ones to take. As she fumbled through them, reading the labels which he had so clearly marked in blue felt tip pen, she was almost overcome by a sense of desperation and failure. He should have had these two days ago, and now she wasn’t sure if he would ever hear them again. Although they were before his time, he appeared to have all The Beatles albums. There were tapes of opera arias, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons , Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim , The Eagles, Handel’s Water Music , Christina Aguilera. Like Steve himself, impossible to categorise. He was unique, and fleetingly she wondered if they might have had some kind of future together had they met some other time, some other place.

She decided to take all the tapes, and emptied a plastic carrier bag she found in one of the cupboards and swept the cassettes into it off the shelf.

She found the picture of Danni, in its little silver frame, tucked in beside the computer monitor where he could look at it any time he chose when he was working at the keyboard. It wasn’t really silver. It was soft, polished pewter, with art nouveau patterns worked into the border. Danni looked out from it with her trademark smile.

‘You’re a little late, aren’t you?’ Margaret swung around, startled, to find Dr. Ward standing in the doorway, his lips pinched and white, dark eyes filled with hostility. ‘I was expecting you two days ago.’

She shook her head and found it hard to defend herself. ‘I was called back to Houston.’

‘And did it not occur to you to make other arrangements?’

There hadn’t been time. She should have made time. She didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m going up there now.’

‘Don’t you want to know how he is?’

‘I’ll find out for myself.’ But her defiance wavered with uncertainly. It was more than three hours since she had received the phone call. She hesitated. ‘How is he?’

He said, ‘From the onset of first symptoms — sore throat, swollen glands, rising temperature — they’ve been pumping him full of antibiotics and rimantadine.’ Margaret had read about rimantadine, one of a new generation of antiviral drugs, reputed to be up to 70 percent effective in inhibiting secondary infection in cases of influenza A virus. ‘So far he seems to have responded well. But the prognosis is uncertain.’

Margaret lifted the bag of cassettes and slipped the pewter frame into her purse. ‘I’d better go, then.’

As she pushed past Ward in the doorway he said, ‘For the first twenty-four hours he was asking for you all the time. But he hasn’t mentioned you once today.’

Margaret stopped and looked into his face. Why did he want to hurt her? Because she knew about his human frailties, had touched his imperfection? Was it guilt, or anger, or just plain bigotry? ‘I guess he must have other things on his mind right now,’ she said, and hurried out.

Margaret pushed her rental car up to eighty on the freeway. It was a big car with soft suspension that rolled gently but too much on every bend in the road. She had passed Gaithersburg about twenty minutes earlier, and as she crested a rise, she could see the lights of Frederick spread out below her. Traffic was light, and another fifteen minutes took her onto the Seventh Street exit, to skirt the northwestern edge of the town to Fort Detrick.

During the forty minutes it had taken her to drive from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner to her destination, she had made a conscious effort to blank out the reason for her trip. Her mind had wandered, and at one point she had figured that the original German settlers must have named the fort Dietrich as in Marlene , and that time had corrupted it to Detrick, the soft German ch that came from the back of the throat hardened to a ck from much further forward on the tongue. And she had almost laughed at herself for allowing such trivia to fill her thoughts. Except that laughter was impossible, and now that she saw the orange flashing lights at the gates of Fort Detrick on the road ahead of her, she felt a constriction in her chest and found it hard to breathe.

The duty doctor was a young woman, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail. She wore army fatigues and carried the rank of major. Her complexion was sallow, and she had large sad eyes that conveyed something of the apprehension she was doing her best to mask. She led Margaret briskly through the labyrinth of corridors to Ward 200. The air at the receiving desk was bristling with tension. Several medical staff looked at Margaret with a mix of curiosity and concern.

‘He’s not good,’ the doctor had said when she picked Margaret up at the front desk. ‘Temperature’s high, over a hundred and six, and there’s fluid in his lungs, intermittent vomiting. He swings between fever and lucidity without warning. His symptoms have developed incredibly fast.’

Margaret reached the door to the Slammer and peered through the window. There were two medical staff in Steve’s room, both wearing light blue protective suits, yellow cable corkscrewing behind them. She could barely see the figure lying on the bed. But she could see the IV feeding lactated Ringer’s solution into his arm to combat dehydration and a forest of wires leading off to the equipment monitoring his condition.

‘We’ve done everything we can to keep his temperature down, but it’s a losing battle,’ the doctor was saying. ‘And it’s impossible to tell at this stage if the rimantadine is having any effect. But he’s strong, you know; he could ride it out.’

Margaret wondered how much homework the doctor had done on the symptoms and progress of the Spanish flu. She remembered Markin’s words: It could reduce a strong, vigorous adult to a quivering wreck in a matter of hours . And then it occurred to her that when the prognosis is bleak and all hope gone, comfort is all that remains. It is the doctor’s final crutch with which to face the patient’s loved ones. Margaret searched the doctor’s face for some sign that she knew something she wasn’t telling. ‘What do you really think?’ she asked.

The doctor shrugged hopelessly. ‘I have no idea. The next few hours will be critical.’

Margaret said, ‘I have stuff for him. A picture of his little girl. Can I go in?’

The doctor closed the door behind her, and she found herself in a small changing room, shelves rising to the ceiling, cotton pants and shirts arranged in colours: white, khaki, blue, brown. Margaret laid her pale blue personal protective suit on the bench and undressed quickly. She slipped into a pair of white pants and shirt, fingers fumbling with the ties, before stepping into the protective suit and zipping herself in.

For a moment she was gripped by panic. Claustrophobia, fear. She turned and saw the plaque on the door, red lettering on white. EMERGENCY DOOR RELEASE. And almost gave in to an impulse to hit the release and get the hell out. She took a deep breath and heard it quivering in the sealed confines of her suit, and then saw her world turn opaque as it misted her visor. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and then turned toward the outer shower. There was no need to decontaminate on the way in.

Clumsy in the suit, she stepped through a short, narrow corridor past the outer shower, closing the door behind her, and opened the heavy stainless steel door into the large chemical decontamination shower. On the inside of it, above a push-handle for opening, was a red warning sign: CLOSE OUTER SHOWER DOOR BEFORE OPENING INNER SHOWER DOOR. She pulled it closed behind her, and looked around the glistening walls of the stainless steel cubicle, pipes and shower heads, stop-cocks with knurled red turning handles. On the way out she would be bombarded in here by liquid chemicals designed to kill every living thing. Her breathing had become shallow and rapid, emphasised in her head by the loudness of it. She thumped the push-handle of the outer door with her open palms and it swung open into the anteroom with the white-painted brick walls that she had seen through the window from the outside. She swung the door shut again, and twisted awkwardly to find the nozzle at the back of her suit that fit the end of the yellow corkscrew cable that hung from the wall on her left, fumbling through her white latex gloves to make the connection. As it locked into place, the suit immediately began to fill with cool, filtered air, expanding around her, and she began to feel the panic diminishing. She could breathe again. The misting on her visor evaporated. She looked around and saw on the shelf behind her the rows of short green booties that the doctor had told her to put on. Moving with the awkward, slow-motion gait of a spaceman, she reached up and pulled down a pair of boots, checking them for size and then slipping her inflated feet inside.