Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Bangley took a while to refocus. When he did he half nodded. That your daughter? Was his answer.

I took her to see the families. She wanted to go as soon as I landed with Pops. She took her medic bag. We landed on the drive and they came from everywhere, some running, some barely able to walk, mustered like some ragtag company along their quarantine line in the yard. We got out and I watched their expressions change as Cima approached. The dark ringed eyes widened in surprise, the lantern jaws fell open, the little ones like curious and half frightened deer, the heads coming forward. If they’d had swiveling ears they would have swiveled, the looks back to their mothers, the excitement.

Cima stepped right across the DMZ, and as one they fell back half a step, almost cringing, and opened a cove of space before her. She held up a long, strong, bruised hand.

It’s okay. I’m a doctor.

As if that explained anything. She smiled. Realized how absurd and archaic.

Hi, I’m Cima.

It may have been her bruises, a subtle sense of frailty, of having survived a terrible sickness. I watched their faces. A few waved, nodded to me, smiled, but. They were studying her with a fascination, a curiosity that almost overcame fear, some kindred welcoming. Of a being maybe that was somehow like them, they weren’t sure how. And different, too, different enough to kindle a fierce wonder. Well. They were Mennonites. A visitation was in their ken. And I thought I was the descending angel. I stood there in the yard for the first time ever not knowing what to do with my big hands, feeling like chopped liver and laughing in surprised and uncomfortable guffs.

And. She was a doctor. But.

Cima—I called.

She half turned.

They—

They. Of course she knew they were contagious. We had talked about it minutes before.

She held up a hand, a gesture of All Okay, and also a little of dismissal, and I had to laugh again. How times change. They had closed the cove around her into a circle and I knew that she had already seduced them or won them, that they loved her as I had loved her, I knew from the first moments.

The children reached out, clung to her skirt, one little girl, I think her name was Lily, Lily held her leg like a bear cub hugs a tree.

Hi! I heard Cima say. Hi. You are pretty. What’s your name? And you? And this handsome little guy.

The wonder of being touched by a stranger. No longer untouchable.

I was worried but. Almost worth whatever would come just to see that scene.

She set up in a room in the old farmhouse what would have then been quaintly called the parlor, and she examined them all. She put on latex gloves. I could see them on her hands as she opened the door to the kitchen and called in the next. Gently. Must have had a stash in her bag. She sewed up bad cuts, dressed wounds, called for buckets of warm water. She counseled a young woman six or seven months pregnant. Consoled, I knew, an older man whose weeping could be heard from outside the screen kitchen door. She told me it was okay for me to come across, to mingle, it was a misperception. Like Hep C, she said. Like HIV used to be. Fluid transfer, blood. Otherwise—

The misperception that had saved their lives. The big signs along the fences at the edge of their fields THE BLOOD. The terror that evoked. The truth of it for anyone with a pair of binoculars to see: the wasted figures bent as if into a stiff wind, the exhausted movements, the hollow eyes. Kept them away, all attackers, preserved their lives as it killed them.

We flew back in silence despite the good headsets.

That night we lay out by the berm, lay close together. Both on our backs, both studying reefs of luminous clouds that tore off from banks over the mountains. They were rinsed by a half moon, and shuddered from within with heat lightning. I watched them fly over and hoped a big rain would send us running into the hangar to be Bangley’s roommates. The country could use some rain. She said There were studies at the end. A few convincing reports.

On the blood?

Mm hm.

I waited.

They suggested that the onset of the autoimmune disease was speeded by a breakdown in the body’s ability to make its own vitamin D. Really a curious mechanism. Like AIDS with T cells. I mean if there is any known analog.

She paused, watched the clouds.

I love it when you talk like that.

She elbowed my ear.

There was no evidence that the converse is true. Hadn’t gotten that far yet. All so new.

That vitamin D could slow the process?

Yes.

Maybe we’ll have to make a run to Walmart.

She was quiet. We watched the clouds. They tore off but never thickened. Not over us. The rain, if there was rain, stayed on the peaks.

Hey, I murmured, wanna hear my favorite poem? It was written in the ninth century, in China.

I thought she was thinking medical thoughts, but then I felt her twitch against me. Not the nightmare twitches Jasper sometimes had but the twitch of falling, of letting go.

On or about. The best I can say now. Bangley had checked off the calendar in my hangar until the attack which I thought especially thoughtful. But. So we knew that happened on June 19th. But he never could say afterward how many days he had been lying behind Red Square. At least a week he thought.

On or about the 4th of July I was working in the garden. Killing potato bugs one at a time. Cima was with the families. I had dropped her off in the morning and she said to pick her up for dinner, she wanted to be there all day. She was dispensing a vitamin D infusion, but I knew it was for the children. She couldn’t stay away from them.

I was working in the garden. She was away. Bangley was playing chess with Pops. That’s what they did. They sat on the porch of my house in the creaking chairs and played chess like it was a country store in some apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell. Bangley’s cane against the rail. He was better at chess, but his mind wandered and then Pops could beat him.

I was squashing potato bugs between my fingers and I heard a sound that I had heard so often I didn’t look up. But. It had been a long time. I craned my head, wincing eyes past the sun and there: two vapor trails. Parallel but one behind. And the distant dopplered rush of receding engines.

Not dreaming, no.

I hadn’t run so fast. In years. Got to the Beast and hit the master switch and flipped on the radio. I had a Narco scanner which ran the digits, the frequencies up through the silence and nothing. Static. Around and around went the numbers. Stopped like a roulette wheel. A break, a fraying of the grayness. A voice, words. Before I pushed the mike button I made myself listen and I couldn’t understand. It was Arabic. Had to be. A conversation, laughter. Heading west at thirty thousand feet. Heading probably to California. From up there, we, our airport, would be indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, the decaying infrastructure. I called and called. The two jets, 747s, Erie, two 747s Erie. Boeing 747s who just overflew Denver, this is Erie . I called and called. Until my voice was hoarse and the streamers of steam were a white memory, a mirage. I stared after them kind of stunned. Good or bad?

A week later, exactly, two more. About the same time. And the next week. The fourth week nothing. The four of us gathered on the porch at the afternoon hour like waiting for some fireworks or a dignitary. And nothing.

They could have immunity, she said. A race could have immunity. Or clusters of immunity. The Arab countries are tribal. An entire tribe could be immune.