The Body Human (5 page)

His wife’s name.
I don’t think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself—I’ll never know how—back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses. Every second I’m waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean’s gray face at dinner:
Fucking
vigilantes’ll
get us all.

The stairs don’t blow up. The fire door at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we’re outside, Randy blacks out.

This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I’m aware of someone running toward us.

“It’s Dr.
Satler
!
Oh my God!”

A man.
A large man.
He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman’s carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.

My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they’ve torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to
the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.

Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me.
All of it.
I pull the car off the road and I can’t stop shaking. Only a few trucks pass me, and n
o
body stops.
It’s
twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.

I turn on the radio as soon as I’ve started the engine.

“—in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare’s Hospital in the heart of Manhattan.
Beleaguered police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby bus
i
nesses and at least one apartment house.

“Since the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to
e
n
dozine
, and its simultaneous release of an emergency
counterbacteria
in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic countermeasure released an additional set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team,
citing fear of reprisals if—”

A burst of static.
The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.

I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.

By the time I reach the west side of
Emerton
, the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look.
Had looked.
My body still doesn’t feel sick.

Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.

The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker:
TO DR. BENNETT.
The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody’s garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a
styrofoam
plate, a stone crucifix, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of
The Prophet
. There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seashells, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.

When I get home, Jack is still asleep.

I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy
Satler
. I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from
Emerton
even in the bad winter weather. About how he’d sit smiling at me through the thick glass in the visitors’ room, his hands with
their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other.
About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her.
About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.

I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.

He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don’t rinse it. When I return, he’s asleep again.

I drive to Jackie’s school, to retrieve my daughter. T
o
gether, we will go to Sylvia Goddard’s—Sylvia James’s—and get Sean. I’ll visit with Sylvia, and shake her hand, and kiss her on the cheek, and touch everything I can. When the kids are safe at home, I’ll visit
Ceci
and tell her I’ve thought it over and I want to help fight the overuse of antibiotics that’s killing us. I’ll touch her, and anyone else there, and everyone that either Sylvia or
Ceci
introduces me to, until I get too sick to do that.
If I get that sick.
Randy said I wouldn’t, not as sick as he is. Of course, Randy has lied to me before. But I have to believe him now, on this.

I don’t really have any choice.
Yet.

A month later, I am on my way to Albany to bring back another dose of the
counterbacteria
, which the news calls “a reengineered prokaryote.” They’re careful not to call it a germ.

I listen to the news every hour now, although Jack
doesn’t like it. Or anything else I’m doing. I read, and I study, and now I know what prokaryotes are, and b
e
ta-lactamase, and plasmids. I know how bacteria fight to survive, evolving whatever they need to wipe out the competition and go on producing the next generation. That’s all that matters to bacteria.
Survival by their own kind.

And that’s what Randy
Satler
meant, too, when he said, “My work is what matters.” Triumph by
his own
kind. It’s what
Ceci
believes, too.
And Jack.

We bring in the reengineered prokaryotes in convoys of cars and trucks, because in some other places there’s been trouble.
People
who don’t understand, people who won’t understand.
People whose family got a lot sicker than mine.
The violence isn’t
over,
even though the CDC says the epidemic itself is starting to come under control.

I’m early. The convoy hasn’t formed yet. We leave from a different place in town each time. This time we’re meeting behind the American Bowl. Sean is already there, with Sylvia. I take a short detour and drive, for the last time, to the Food Mart.

The basket is gone, with
all its
letters to the dead man. So are the American flag and the peace sign. The crucifix is still there, but it’s broken in half. The latest flowers in the wine bottle are half wilted. Rain has muddied the Barbie
doll’s
dress, and her long blonde hair is a mess. Someone ripped up the anti-NRA stickers. The white candle on a
styrofoam
plate and the pile of seashells are untouched.

We are not bacteria. More than survival matters to us, or should.
The individual past, which we can’t escape, no
matter how hard we try.
The individual present, with its unsafe choices.
The individual future.
And the collective one.

I search in my pockets. Nothing but keys, money clip, lipstick, tissues, a blue marble I must have stuck in my pocket when I cleaned behind the couch. Jackie likes ma
r
bles.

I put the marble beside the candle, check my gun, and drive to join the convoy for the city.

“If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”

—Immanuel Kant

The first day of school, we had assault-with-intent in Ms. Kelly’s room. I was in my room next door, 136, laying down the law to 7C math. The usual first-day bullshit: turn in homework every day, take your assigned seat as soon as you walk in, don’t bring a weapon or an abusive attitude into my classroom or you’ll wish you’d never been born. The kids would ignore the
first,
do the others—for me anyway.
Apparently not for Jenny Kelly.

“Mr.
Shaunessy
! Mr.
Shaunessy
! Come quick, they throwing chairs next door!
The new teacher crying!”
A
pretty, tiny girl I recognized from last year:
Lateesha
Je
f
ferson. Her round face glowed with excitement and sati
s
faction. A riot! Already! On the very first day!

I looked over my class slowly, penetratingly, letting my gaze linger on each upturned face. I took my time about it. Most kids dropped their eyes. Next door, something heavy hit the wall. I lowered my voice, so everybody had to strain to hear me.

“Nobody move while I’m gone. You all got that?”

Some heads nodded. Some kids stared back, uncertain but cool. A few boys smirked and I brought my unsmiling gaze to their faces until they stopped. Shouts filtered through the wall.

“Okay,
Lateesha
, tell Ms. Kelly I’m coming.” She took off like a shot, grinning, Paul Revere in purple leggings and silver shoes.

I limped to the door and turned for a last look. My st
u
dents all sat quietly, watching me. I saw Pedro
Valesquez
and Steven Cheung surreptitiously scanning my jacket for the bulge of a service revolver that of course wasn’t there. My reputation had become so inflated it rivaled the NYC budget. In the hall
Lateesha
screamed in a voice that could have deafened rock stars, “Mr.
Shaunessy
coming! You ho’s better stop!”

In 134, two eighth-grade girls grappled in the middle of the floor.
For a wonder, neither seemed to be armed, not even with keys.
One girl’s nose streamed blood. The ot
h
er’s blouse was torn. Both screamed incoherently, nonstop, like stuck sirens. Kids raced around the room. A chair had apparently been hurled at the chalkboard, or at somebody
once standing in front of the chalkboard; chair and board had cracked. Jenny Kelly yelled and waved her arms.
Lateesha
was wrong; Ms. Kelly wasn’t crying. But neither was she helping things a hell of a lot. A few kids on the perimeter of the chaos saw me and fell silent, curious to see what came next.

And then I saw Jeff Connors, leaning against the wi
n
dow wall, arms folded across his chest, and his expression as he watched the fighting girls told me everything I needed to know.

I took a huge breath, letting it fill my lungs. I bellowed at top volume, and with no facial expression whatsoever, “Freeze!
Now!”

And everybody did.

The kids who didn’t know me looked instantly for the gun and the back-up. The kids who did know me grinned, stifled it, and nodded slightly. The two girls stopped pounding each other to twist toward the noise—my bellow had shivered the hanging fluorescents—which was time enough for me to limp across the floor, grab the girl on top, and haul her to her feet. She twisted to swing on me, thought better of it, and stood there, panting.

The girl on the floor whooped, leaped up, and tensed to slug the girl I held. But then she stopped. She didn’t know me, but the scene had alerted her: nobody yelling anymore, the other wildcat quiet in my grip, nobody racing around the room. She glanced around, puzzled.

Jeff still leaned against the wall.

They expected me to say something. I said nothing, just stood there, impassive. Seconds dragged by.
Fifteen, thirty,
forty-five.
To adults, that’s a long time. To kids, it’s fo
r
ever. The adrenaline ebbs away.