Authors: Caroline M. Cooney
So somebody with great credentials was interested, and he didn't sound nervous either.
re: scabs
: I am with USAMRIID, the U.S. Amy Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. We need to examine the scab you have. Answer ASAP.
re: scabs
: Thank you for contacting the International Association for Infectious Disease Research. IAIDR would like to
obtain the scabs. Infectivity may have survived. Please call the phone number below or e-mail immediately.
Infectivity was the ability to infect.
Infectivity may have survived
?. Mitty thought. Well, it didn't. If infectivity had survived, the Harvard guy would have said so.
And then he thought, Wait. I didn't write to USAMRIID. I didn't write to any government agency. I'm not into authority right now.
So somebody had forwarded Mitty's message.
He had known for several days now that he was not in control of his body or his health. But somehow he had expected to be in control of his own questions.
re: scabs
: Your e-mail was forwarded to me. Where on earth did you find scabs of smallpox? How do you know that's what they are? Did you touch them? Call the hotline of your CDC.
This was from a doctor in Germany. Mitty had written to sites with the word
international
in their title, but he figured
international
was just a word, like
association
or
fellowship
. But of course it wasn't, especially not on the Web.
re: scabs
: I am an infectious disease researcher with a collection of material related to epidemics. I would
very much like to examine these scabs and possibly purchase them. When and where did you locate them?
That was the sickest hobby Mitty had ever heard of. A guy who bought disease leftovers? But Mitty was drawn to sick people. Besides, this message was kind of fun, and Mitty felt in need of a little fun, so he wrote back.
>I'm the one with the smallpox scabs.
The collector was online and answered in real time, which was a nice coincidence.
>I would do
anything
to get those.
Mitty responded.
>I know some sick people, but you're out there, man.
>I'm a collector. Collectors are nuts. I own the lancet Edward Jennings used when he cut James Phipps's arm open for the very first vaccination. It looks like a switchblade made of tortoiseshell. Want to see it?
Wouldn't a thing like that be in some important British museum? thought Mitty. Or a medical school exhibit?
>When did you find the scabs? wrote the collector.
>Last Sunday in an envelope inside an old medical text.
>You've been handling them for seven days? You near a major medical center?
>I'm in New York. I'm near fifty major medical centers.
>I'm in New York too. Let's meet so I can get the scabs and you can see my other stuff.
Mitty had a moment of caution.
Kids in New York City had more independence by far than kids in suburbs. In suburbs their moms had to drive them; in the city kids learned to navigate on their own; they spent their childhoods getting safety lectures and holding hands and pairing up during school excursions, and then they walked out the door into a vast city. Almost always, they were just fine.
Almost.
This guy—or woman—was maybe too weird to meet. Mitty abandoned him and opened the next message.
re: scabs
: I am an infectious disease researcher with a pharmaceutical firm and would be very excited to examine
those scabs. If you live near me, I'll take you to our research facilities. We could use my scanning electron microscope so you can photograph virions of your very own scab. If you don't live near me, I'll find a colleague in your area. Dr. J.H.D. Redder.
Mitty loved those three initials. Maybe instead of changing from Mitty Blake to Mitchell Blake, he'd become M.J. Blake. He found a paper and pencil and wrote
M.J. Blake
.
Boring. It needed that third initial. Mitty entertained himself with selections of initials. He'd always been fond of the letter
X
.
M.X.J. Blake? No.
He doubled one of his initials: M.M.J. Blake.
He liked it.
Then he answered Dr. Redder's e-mail, because although he had no idea what a scanning electron microscope was, it had to be better than the junk in the school science lab, and he didn't know what a virion was either, but photographs of his own virions would definitely oneup Nate.
Dr. Redder too was online at that moment and cruised right up with a response. Late afternoon was a pretty common time to be online, because people were checking their end-of-the-day mail, but Mitty was a little surprised to have been reached by two in a row. It was like middle school, when nobody had anything to do except communicate.
>When did you locate the smallpox scabs?
Mitty and Dr. Redder went through the same exchange of information he had gone through with the collector.
>Where are you? I'll find a lab with a SEM.
>New York answered Mitty, which wasn't giving much away; eight million other people were in New York too.
>Terrific, I'm at New York Presbyterian.
>I was just up there at the medical library! typed Mitty and immediately regretted it. Dr. Redder would expect a brilliant student to show up. Mitty wasn't one. He decided to bring Olivia along.
>I'll make you a 3-D image of your specific virus on the SEM.
Mitty thought, Wait. You can't be with a pharmaceutical firm and also be with New York Presbyterian, can you? I'll get back to you, he wrote. Mitty had a bad history of getting back to people at the best of times, but this guy was too eager.
Mitty moved on. He was sorry he had e-mailed anybody. He couldn't be going around displaying his scabs like a sideshow and making appointments with people to schedule envelope openings.
Mblak
: Thank you for contacting our site. We have a policy of not
responding to questions from students doing papers. We suggest sites linked to this one.
Same to you, thought Mitty.
He was feeling pretty normal again. Sure, one outfit thought infectivity might have survived, and the doctor in Germany wanted him to call a hotline, but everybody else seemed pretty low-key.
The next message was from the woman who had been looking for survivors.
re: scabs
: I don't think the scab could be contagious after all this time— viruses tend toward a shelf life measured in hours or days—but I don't know; I don't suppose anyone knows. I've forwarded your e-mail to the CDC. Meanwhile, please telephone me promptly to discuss this. If there is infectivity, it must be controlled. I need to examine the scabs in my laboratory.
This was the only person whose responses he knew were real, because
he
had answered
her
. Everybody else could be insane guys with political problems staying up all night and telling lies.
If there is infectivity
…
re: scabs
: Your e-mail was forwarded to me. How long have you had these scabs? Are they infectious? I guess not, or
you'd be dead by now and so would your country. How do you know they're smallpox?
re: scabs
: Your e-mail was forwarded to me. I'm a public health physician in Louisiana. A case of smallpox would take precedence over any health problem on earth. Go to the CDC home page and notify them that you have been exposed to dangerous material.
re: scabs
: It's barely three years since we had an anthrax scare and you're trying to start a smallpox scare? I've forwarded your threatening e-mail to the FBI.
An e-mail from Mitty Blake, bottom of the junior class at St. Raphael's, had been forwarded to the FBI?
If the FBI and the CDC didn't have people reading stuff on Sunday night and Mondays were too busy, they'd read it Tuesday. First they'd figure out who [email protected] was. Government agencies could order a provider to hand over information, so the FBI would know in a heartbeat what straph.edu was. One call to St. Raphael's and they'd be told mblak's full name, address, phone number and probably his grade point average and where his mother was born.
Of course, now that he thought about it, pretty much anybody with half a brain would know that
edu
meant a school. They would separate
straph
into
st raph
and come up with St. Raphael's. Probably several schools in
America were named St. Raphael's, and he knew of at least one hospital, but it wouldn't take long to narrow down. Even the guy in Germany must have guessed Mitty was American because Mitty wrote in English and referred to a term paper.
The FBI? Come on. They had better things to do.
A case of smallpox would take precedence over any health problem on earth
.
In which case, no, the FBI would not have better things to do.
“Hey, Mitt!”yelled his father.
The front door slammed. Mitty shut down his e-mail.
“Mitty!” caroled his mother.“We're home! Do you want to order pizza? There's a UConn game tonight! Notre Dame! We're going to slaughter them!”
But Mitty Blake was playing a more serious game.
I
t was a close game.
His parents were excited and then desperate, cheering and then moaning.
It was all Mitty could do to mumble a syllable now and then. He wanted to tell his parents everything, but he wanted them away from him: miles away, oceans away. And here they were on the same sofa.
He couldn't follow the game—he, Mitty, who loved college basketball the most of any sport. When the camera panned the crowd at Notre Dame, he saw only variola major working its way through eleven thousand people.
UConn lost.
Mitty hardly noticed.
Normally Mitty yelled and stomped, threw things and
high-fived, placed rational or insane bets and groaned afterward about how UConn should have played better.
Now he just waited quietly while his father wound down from the excitement and the frustration of a loss until at last Mitty could retire to the safety and privacy of his room.
He couldn't sit. Couldn't lie down. Couldn't do anything except listen to the echoes of electronic voices.
Infectivity may have survived. Answer ASAP. A case of smallpox would take precedence over any health problem on earth. I have forwarded your e-mail to the FBI
.
He was aware of his parents in their room and the blockade of closets and bathrooms between them. He heard when they turned off their bedroom TV and closed their books; except for sports, they never watched TV without also reading. (It seemed to Mitty that they missed the entire point of television.) At last all was still and they were asleep.
And Mitty too was still.
When he was little, Mitty had often been mesmerized by the round windows in the humming clothes dryers down in the building's laundry room. He would stand holding his nanny's hand, watching socks inside get thrown against the glass, then underwear, followed by pillowcases, and here would come those socks again. His thoughts had always been like that—like flailing sleeves of shirts, revolving and tumbling.
The cycle had ended. Mitty's mind lay as quiet as folded laundry.
Call the CDC hotline
.
If he called the CDC and said, “I opened this old book?
And handled old smallpox scabs? And I might be infected?”—wouldn't they just laugh?
But if they didn't laugh? If they came to his house? Wanted to examine him?
Then what?
He did not want to be a specimen.
Demon in the Freezer
described what happened to an English victim in the 1970s who'd gotten sick from a laboratory accident, and to a German victim in 1969 who'd been traveling through India in an area where smallpox still existed. These patients had become display items, public property; they had been stared at, studied and examined. And furthermore, every person they had come near had been stared at, studied and examined. Those two victims had had no meaning to anybody except that they could kill by breathing.
Typhoid Mary. Nobody had cared what that poor woman thought or hoped for. Her life didn't matter. She was a threat. Lock her up.
Mitty thought—as he often did, because it was every athlete's fear—about the most unfortunate ball player in history: Bill Buckner, who let a ground ball roll between his legs and lost game six of the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. Bill Buckner entered history because of one split second when he goofed.
Mitty too would find a place in history, but his would be worse. He'd be the one who brought smallpox back.
If he got smallpox, they would ring-vaccinate Manhattan. There would be immunization stations in Grand Central and at St. Raphael's. The city would go through hell, all because Mitty Blake had done his homework for a change.
Mitty slept in shorts and an extralarge Old Navy T-shirt. Around two a.m., he went into his bathroom and peeled them off. In front of the mirrors, he examined himself.
No lesions. But it was too early anyway. This was not yet dawn of day ten.
He took out his old medical texts again. He didn't care what anybody modern said. He needed guys who knew what they were talking about, who'd been there, done that, buried the victims. Each old source said the same thing. No symptoms and no way to infect anybody else for twelve to fourteen days after exposure.
He felt like a person who knows perfectly well why he's coughing, bleeding and exhausted—he's got cancer. But still he won't go to the doctor, because as long as the diagnosis isn't definite, it's possible to pretend.
There was a difference here. If you didn't treat your cancer, it was your problem. But if you didn't treat smallpox, it was the world's problem. If Mitty pretended he was fine, and then he got smallpox and infected other people, Mitty Blake would be a murderer.