Parasite (Parasitology) (23 page)

“And I was never your patient. Dating me is more like dating one of those extras who only appears in one episode and then goes off to be on a different show.” I touched his cheek lightly with the back of my hand, doing my best to keep my own anxiety in check. Nathan needed me. I was going to be there for him. “You’re doing your job. Now what happened with Kate?”

Nathan took a deep breath. “She was presenting with normal symptoms for the sleeping sickness. The EMTs who were working on her decided to let Devi stay in the room, because she wasn’t getting in the way, and it was easier than separating them. Devi wasn’t getting in the way. She was crying and trying to hold Kate’s hand when she could, but she understood that if she interfered at all, she’d be asked to leave.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Devi’s dead.” Nathan made the statement without emotion or inflection: it was a fact, and he presented it as such. I dropped my hand, eyes widening. He turned to look at me, and there was no life in his expression. He looked as empty as his voice sounded. “She was holding Kate’s hand, and Kate attacked her.”

“Wh-what?”

“The EMTs didn’t have a chance to react. They’d never seen that kind of behavior from one of the sleeping sickness cases before. One moment, Kate was on the bed, unresponsive, and the next, she was sitting up and grabbing Devi by the throat. Her trachea was crushed. It broke her hyoid bone. They couldn’t react in time. She died before they even got her onto a table.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Kate never even blinked. Not even when they were pulling her off her wife’s body. She never blinked. As soon as they got her away from Devi, she went limp, and returned to the base fugue state that they all seem to be in.” Nathan moved abruptly, standing and starting toward his dresser. “I need to get to the hospital. They need me. I’m really sorry to do this, but if I leave you money, can you take a cab to work in the morning? I’m not sure I’ll be back.”

“Of course. This isn’t the time for me to insist you be the one to drive me.” Devi was dead. Katherine had the sleeping sickness, and now Devi was dead. I stayed on the bed, watching Nathan as he dressed, and tried to make my thoughts stop spinning wildly around those two poles: Devi was dead, and Katherine had the sleeping sickness.

Whatever answers we might find, they were going to come too late for Devi, who had always been kind to me, and for Katherine, who had loved her wife very much. Even if they could find a cure for the sleeping sickness, how was Katherine
ever going to recover from what she’d done? “I was in a coma, I didn’t know” didn’t seem like much of a justification. It wouldn’t have worked for me. It wasn’t going to work for her.

Nathan crossed back to the bed and bent to kiss me quickly, whispering, “I’m sorry.” He thrust forty dollars into my hand. Then he was out the door, leaving me sitting on the bed and staring blankly after him.

It wasn’t until the front door slammed that I actually turned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was a little bit after three o’clock in the morning. A new day had started. It hadn’t started particularly well.

Instead of going back to sleep, I decided to go home. Beverly would need to be fed, and I could use the company. The taxi let me off in front of my house half an hour later. The driver insisted on staying to see me get inside, possibly because I’d tipped well before getting out of the vehicle. I didn’t mind. It was nice to know that there was someone at my back if I needed it.

Beverly met me at the door, tail wagging wildly from side to side, mouth hanging open in a wide canine grin. She didn’t bark. Her previous owner had trained her well before the sleeping sickness had taken him away from her. For the first time, I looked down at my accidental dog and wondered if she missed the man she used to live with. Dogs were loyal. How much time did she spend wondering if he was ever going to come and take her home?

I waved to the taxi before stepping into the house and easing the door closed behind me. If I was quiet, maybe I wouldn’t wake anybody else up. They all had things to do in the morning, and I had already e-mailed Will to let him know I wouldn’t be in. Nathan was going to need me when he finished his shift and finally allowed himself to think about the reality of what
had happened. Devi was gone. Devi wasn’t coming back. We both had to deal with that.

Beverly followed me to my room, tail still waving. At least someone was happy about my unexpected return. I sat down on the bed, patting the mattress to encourage her to jump up. Not that it took much encouragement; with Beverly, keeping her
out
of the bed was usually a harder task. She hopped up and sat down next to me, tail wagging harder than ever. It kept wagging as I bent over, put my arms around her neck, and wept silently into her fur.

About five minutes had passed when I heard my father clear his throat. I looked up to find him standing in the doorway of my room. The hallway light was on, turning him into a black outline of a man. Quietly, he asked, “Long night?”

“Dad.” I straightened, wiping my eyes. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

“That’s a good thing, since it looks like you told me you were going to be spending the night at your boyfriend’s house, and now you’re sitting on your bed crying on the dog. That’s the sort of thing that makes a father wonder whether he needs to give some lessons on manners to a certain young man.”

I shook my head quickly. “No. Nathan didn’t do anything wrong. I came home because he had to go to the hospital, and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to make it back. It seemed like a better idea for me to be here.”

“Is everything all right?”

The backlighting made it impossible for me to see the expression on my father’s face, but he sounded sincerely worried. I sighed, wiping my eyes again, and said, “No. Not really.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Maybe.” I sniffled.

My father took that as an invitation. He walked into my room and pulled out the desk chair, sitting on the edge. This
close, and without the light shining from directly behind him, I could actually see the concern in his eyes. “What happened?”

“We were asleep when Nathan’s phone rang and woke us both up. His… his research assistant’s wife caught the sleeping sickness. Her name’s Devi. The research assistant, I mean, not the wife. Devi brought her to the hospital for treatment, and the EMTs let them stay together because what would be the harm, you know? The sleeping sickness is pretty passive. Only it wasn’t passive when Chave caught it. She was attacking people.”

“And Devi’s wife did the same thing,” said my father. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. “She did.” I was crying again. I wiped my cheek and said, “She went for Devi. They didn’t expect it, and Devi didn’t move back in time, and she… and she…” I stopped talking and just cried. It was all I could do. To his credit, my father leaned forward and put his arms around me, holding me until the tears tapered off. When I pulled away, he let me go.

I don’t think I’d ever loved him more than I did in that moment.

“Did Devi die?” he asked, very quietly.

I nodded, biting my lip to keep myself from starting to cry again. That was the last thing I wanted to do.

My father sighed. “You know there are things about my work that I’m not allowed to talk about. It’s always been that way, since before Joyce was born.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“No, you don’t. Because I forget sometimes you don’t have—you don’t remember all those years of being told you couldn’t ask me about my job. You lost those memories in the accident, and we’ve all come to terms with the fact that they’re not coming back, but sometimes I still catch myself treating you like you ought to know when you can’t ask me things. That’s why I was so short with you this morning, and I’m sorry.”

“You’re still not telling me anything.”

“I know.” He shook his head. “It’s difficult, Sal. Heck, even things like this are difficult for me. The Sally Mitchell who grew up in this room would never have let me past the doorway. If she’d been careless enough to get caught crying, she would have locked me right out in the hall when she realized it.”

I frowned. Sometimes hearing about the woman I was before the accident made me want to punch myself in the nose. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault. My oldest daughter was a wild girl from day one, and we never did learn how to see eye to eye on much of anything other than how many times I could ground her.” My father shook his head. “As for what you asked yesterday, it’s… complicated. Yes, we know some things that aren’t being discussed with the public, but we’ve been able to share most of that information with the medical community. We have reason to believe that some other people know a great deal more and are sharing a great deal less, which, as you can imagine, is making us all just a little bit unhappy.”

“You’re talking about SymboGen, aren’t you?”

He smiled a little. “You’re a smart girl. A little naïve sometimes, but that’s to be expected with the amount of experience you’ve got to go by. Yes, I’m talking about SymboGen. They aren’t the first corporation to turn public health into a stockholder concern, but they’re definitely the one that’s causing me the most grief right now. And not just because they saved your life, which makes it politically difficult to cut ties with them.”

“But you’re the government. Can’t you
make
them tell you what you want to know? If people are getting sick, doesn’t that mean SymboGen is doing something wrong?”

To my surprise, he shook his head. “There’s something called ‘burden of proof’ that even the government has to respect. Thus far, we haven’t been able to prove that SymboGen knows anything, or that the current epidemic is in any way related to
them or to their business. SymboGen is a very powerful corporation, and if we overstep too soon, we might find ourselves unable to get any answers out of them at all.”

I looked at him blankly. “But you’re the
government
,” I repeated.

“We’re the government, and you know what the most powerful weapon against the government is? Money. SymboGen has lots and lots of money, and they know how to spend it. Their lobbyists are extremely influential, and if we move against them before we are
absolutely sure
we have a case, we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble. I could lose my job. We still wouldn’t have any answers. And you…” He stopped, looking uncomfortable.

I might not understand politics, but I understood that expression. “I could find myself needing to choose between SymboGen and my family. But I pretty much have a clean bill of health at this point, don’t I? It’s been over a year since my last incident…”

“And what happens if you have another one? SymboGen is the only reason you’ve survived the last two.”

“Maybe they’re over.” Maybe. Or maybe they’d started before my accident. I’d seen the traffic camera footage of the crash: one second, normal girl driving; the next, spasms and a total loss of control. It was terrifying, especially because I couldn’t remember it at all. “They’ve been tapering off.”

“Have they? You could have been having attacks for months before your accident. You weren’t always open with us… before. You could have been very sick and still decided not to say anything, because you didn’t want us to know.”

I took a deep breath, but I didn’t object. Everything I knew about Sally Mitchell told me that he was right. There was no point in arguing with the truth.

“Apart from that… we still haven’t found a medical cause for your attacks.” He glanced away. I frowned. He kept talking:
“So there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again, and given the amount of damage the first one did—damage we’re still finding out about, and that you’re still recovering from—we have no way of knowing what the next one would do to you.”

“So it’s my fault you can’t move against SymboGen,” I said. The bitterness in my voice surprised even me.

Dad blinked. Then he shook his head, and said, “No. You’re a part of the greater whole, but it’s not entirely on you.”

“I know, but…”

“This morning you asked me whether I knew anything that I wasn’t sharing with you. There isn’t much. But one of the things I do know is that the behavior of the afflicted is starting to change. They’re starting to become aggressive. Your friend… this is the first I’ve heard of someone actually dying because they’d been attacked by someone who was sick. It may be because she didn’t try to step away. We very rarely react defensively to the people we love.”

The first person I’d seen with the sleeping sickness had been a little girl, pursued by her mother. “Are we just hoping that no one else who gets sick has anybody around who cares about them?”

My father grimaced. “No. But Sal, we don’t know enough to know what’s happening. Most of the people who get sick don’t turn violent. We don’t want people to start turning on their family members because they’re frightened—and this is already a terrifying illness. People you know and love seem to disappear before your eyes. It would be irresponsible of us to make that even more frightening.”

“So you’re just going to say nothing, and let people like Devi keep getting hurt?”

“We’re not suppressing any information. I’m sure the news will pick this up and start telling the world very soon, if they haven’t done so already. But we’re not going to make any official statements until we know more than we know right now.”
He stood. “It’s a horrible solution. There are no good solutions left.”

“Dad—”

My father paused in the process of leaving the room. He looked back over his shoulder at me and said, quietly, “You know, Sal, I’m very glad I’ve had the chance to know you. You’re a good person, and you still surprise me.”

I blinked at him, not sure what I could say to that. He took advantage of my brief silence and made his escape. I stared after him. Finally, I turned to Beverly, and asked, “Any thoughts?”

She wagged her tail.

Eventually, I got up and closed my bedroom door, and sometime after that, I managed to fall asleep. Sleep didn’t come easily, and once I found it, my dreams were full of darkness. Darkness, and the drums.