The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (16 page)

I’m sure you’ve heard about some of these things before. In World War II the Japanese tried the plague on China and killed a couple of hundred Chinese, but also one of their own companies of soldiers. They were also, later in the war, planning to try it on San Diego, California, but then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and they signed the surrender. And all the old Agency stories—the news media coverage, the “black ops,” the assassinations of heads of state, the secret support of
coups d’état
—all those covert actions that got the intelligence community in trouble in the 1970s. You’ve heard about those things, I’m sure. 

They didn’t want me as an intelligence analyst. They wanted me to do this other work for them—in countries where they needed it done. I needed training for that—any twenty-two-year-old would have—and it was the kind any overseas operative would get. In my case it was training for South America. It lasted sixteen weeks—they taught me Spanish and E&E, escape and evasion—and gave me some medic training, some reporter-skills training (I’ll talk about that in a minute), and some firearms training—which was pretty funny with my bad eyesight. Right before I left for all that training I went to visit my parents. I couldn’t tell them anything, but I wanted them to be proud of me. All I could say was, “I’m about to work for the intelligence community, Dad. But not as an analyst. I’m heading out in two days for sixteen weeks of training.” 

“I thought that might be what was happening, Matt,” he told me with a smile, but I could tell he was worried. Analysts live safe lives. Field operatives don’t always. “You haven’t been saying much recently.” 

“You’re right,” I said. “That was why.” 

I couldn’t tell them what I’d be doing. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even if I’d been allowed to, how could I? 

“I know I can’t ask you anything about it, Matt, and that’s okay,” my dad said. “During the war in the Pacific we couldn’t tell our families. No places, people, events. Just what we were feeling. Whenever you want to tell us how you’re feeling, we’d like to hear. We’re very happy for you.” 

I didn’t become what I would become until maybe the second mission. I didn’t develop the habits, I mean—the crazy ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that you develop when you know that if you touch someone you love, you may be giving them a disease that will kill them—until later. Those things didn’t really start until after the first mission, though during that mission I’d meet people I liked and they’d be in the city where I needed to start the thing, and I had no choice—it was important that I start it there, in that city, if what we needed to have happen was to happen. 

I remember a young woman in—a midsized city—let’s call it Santa Livia. That’s not its real name, but I still can’t use the real names. She was an ex-Peace Corps worker and back in the States I’d have asked her out; but when I met her she was in—in Santa Livia working for a civilian aid organization. And that was the city where they wanted me to crack the hollow thing in my tooth to start it. All I needed to do after I cracked it was take the train from Santa Livia to the next two cities on the train route and cough a lot. It was in my bloodstream and that’s all it would take. I’d cough, put my hand over my mouth, cough some more, touch the railings and doors of the train as I left and entered each car along the way. It was easy. You weren’t sick yourself—you didn’t have the symptoms—and the first time you did it you couldn’t believe you were starting an epidemic. How could you be starting an epidemic just by doing that? You didn’t believe it. You were just doing what they wanted you to do. 

When I’d reach the third city, I’d crack the other three fillings on the other side of my mouth and the antibiotic would kill the
Yersinia
in my bloodstream; and I’d continue on the train to—let’s call them Santo Tomas and Santa Carolina . . . and Morela. If anyone tried to track the spread of it, the “vector trail,” as they called it, would end in Morela; but only the World Health Organization would know how to track it and by the time they did, my train trip would be lost in the epidemic. Everyone—the cities, the government, the aid organizations—would be overwhelmed in days by the infected and no one could charge the U.S. with anything even if we got what we wanted. The disease would move from city to city within a day, and there’d be geometric spread—the kind you get in urban areas with rats, fleas, and aerial transmission—out from those cities. I’d be evacuated along with other non-quarantined Americans before the disease could hit the capital, where I was staying. 

Spreading it that way made it look natural. That was, as I think I said, the main reason to have someone—a human carrier—do it—do it “by hand,” as we liked to say—in a couple of cities and then let it spread. Looking natural was important. The word you hear all the time in CIA movies—“deniability”—is true. It’s not just a Hollywood idea. That was the guiding principle. You don’t have to have it deniable in economic warfare, the way we do things now; but you do in covert-action matters. Economic warfare—public sector and private sector both—works better anyway. 

She had blue eyes and she liked me, I think. I didn’t know if she got out. I didn’t want to know. She was in the first city and maybe that gave her a chance, unless she chose to stay—to help. With pneumonic, if it’s an untreated population, you can have ninety to one hundred percent mortality. With bubonic it tends just to be fifty to sixty percent, so I didn’t know. 

After doing those three cities, I took the train back to the capital and found myself not looking at women or children. If I looked at them, I felt like they were going to die, that I was going to kill them—which could have been true, but not in the way it felt at the moment. I felt that my eyes—just my eyes—could do it. If I looked at them, they’d die. And with the women, if I thought they were beautiful, they’d also die because I thought it—because I thought they were beautiful. 

Later, it would get a lot worse—the superstitions and habits—but that’s how it started, on the first mission. Not looking at women and children. 

Or anyone who looked at all like my parents. 

It started with toothbrushes, I guess. That’s when I first really noticed it. Not just averting my eyes on a train, but actual things I could touch—that I took home with me, and couldn’t get away from. I wasn’t supposed to do anything to draw attention to myself when I was in the field; but after the first mission, it was like I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth, so I started buying toothbrushes, one for every day; and I’d wrap up each one in a plastic bag at the end of the day. I started doing this when I was still in the field the second time. It was in the capital city, when all of the uninfected Americans and Europeans and Chinese and Japanese were being rushed out by jet. I used up ten toothbrushes in six days—that’s more than one a day—right before I was evacked. 

Back in the States, they had me live in Minneapolis. Why, I don’t know. They didn’t check me in at Langley—Agency headquarters—when I got back. Not at first. They put me in Walter Reed, the big military hospital in DC. I was there for three days to make sure I wasn’t still carrying, and then I did go to Langley for debriefing, a week of it, if I remember correctly. And then finally to Minneapolis, where they wanted me low profile until they needed me again, which wouldn’t be for another six months. I kept buying the toothbrushes—a different one, sometimes two, for each day, and eventually rubber gloves to hold them with and plastic bags to put them in. I’d put them in the blue dumpsters behind my apartment. I wanted to burn them in a furnace, but the building didn’t have one. 

I noticed, too, that I didn’t touch things out in public, or where other people could touch what I’d touched. I could have hired a maid—the Agency would have paid for it—but I wouldn’t hire a maid. I didn’t want her touching what I’d touched in the apartment. Out in public if I touched things it would be with my left hand, the hand I never let come near my mouth. 

I was back in my own country again—with people I’d grown up with and cared about—and if I wasn’t careful (a voice was telling me), I could start it here. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but that’s how it felt. I was clean, completely clean, but that’s how it felt. 

I had no social life, even though my case agent—let’s call him Rod—kept telling me I needed one. “It’s easier in DC,” I’d tell him. “There’s no social life in Minneapolis.” 

“That’s not the reason, Matt,” he’d say, “and you know it.” 

“What are you talking about?” I’d say, pretending I didn’t know. 

“You’re agoraphobic and you need to work your way out of it. It happens. It’s going to happen in work like this. Do you want to see an Agency shrink?” 

“No.” I wanted to work it out myself. I didn’t want to be in a shrink’s office where I could touch things and the shrink might die. 

Sometimes Rod would visit me—maybe four times while I was there, during those six months—and his visits helped. Someone who knew me and thought I was okay—despite what kind of work I did—who wasn’t afraid to sit near me or touch me. He was a short, squat man, and pretty gruff—a little like Joe Friday, real old-school, OSS originally—but he reminded me of Professor Booth, because he also seemed to care. I’m not sure he did—that either of them really cared—but that’s how it felt, and it helped. 

I certainly didn’t date. I didn’t have to work. I had all this free time, but I didn’t socialize unless I had to. I told people in the building that I was a writer and I know they thought I was some rich kid who didn’t have to work, who could just write a book while everyone else worked. They didn’t like that, which meant no one wanted to be around me—which was great. I had a different name, different social security number, the usual witness-protection kind of cover; and everyone assumed I was a trust-fund kid, I’m sure. I had all the time in the world, so I read a lot. When you read a lot you don’t meet a lot of people. You don’t meet a lot of girls. 

But there was one—her name was Trisha—she lived down the hallway—but when I thought of dating her, I saw myself sitting in my car and watching it happen. They’d given me a car, a ’68 Mustang fastback—the kind of car a trust-fund kid would have—and I saw myself sitting in it with her and, though she wanted me to kiss her, I couldn’t. Why? Because if I did she’d jerk back like she’d been shot and I’d have to watch her get sick and die. 

It would be like time-lapse photography, like a flower in a Disney nature movie blooming real fast, the buboes blooming like flowers, and then she’d be dead. 

That’s what I’d see if I thought of asking her out, but I finally did—maybe because I thought I should. I knew I was going crazy and maybe it would help. She wouldn’t die—I knew that—and seeing that she didn’t die might just help. But when I did ask her, when I got off the phone after asking her out, I threw up. I threw up on the bed where I’d made the call. I couldn’t stop shaking and I didn’t pick her up that Saturday. I never called her again, I avoided her in the hallway, and I didn’t return her call the one time she called me two weeks later. 

I also had a chance to see my parents during those six months and didn’t. I couldn’t. 

I’d phone and tell my dad that they had me real busy, that even when I was out of the field they were keeping me busy, and he’d say, “That’s fine, Matt. I know how it goes. My good friend Gavin from the Academy was ONI and he was the busiest man I ever knew. Just hearing your voice is wonderful. Call us when you can.” 

Or he’d tease me and say, “You’re not trying to avoid us, are you?” and I’d lie and say, “You know me better than that.” I’d say it to my mom, too. “You know I love you both. If I’m not going to get to see you, I want at least to call. I want you to at least hear my voice.” 

“You know we’re proud of you,” they’d both say, and they’d mean it. I didn’t let myself wonder what they’d think if they knew what I was doing. Maybe they wouldn’t want to know. 

My dad died of a heart attack right after my third mission and I wanted to make it to the funeral, but I just couldn’t do that either. I talked to my mom for a long time on the phone, trying to explain why I couldn’t, inventing all sorts of things; and though I know she believed me—I know it made her proud—I know she was disappointed. But she’d been married to a Navy man, so she knew what sacrificing for your country was. 

I was sitting watching television in my apartment in Phoenix—this time they had me in Arizona—when my dad’s funeral started four hundred miles away. I remember looking at my watch every five minutes for an hour. I don’t remember what was on television. I remember hearing in my head what I would have said about him if I’d been there. I remember imagining his body in a casket, starting to smell, the rash and bumps, and stopping myself—and then just seeing my mother’s face and hugging her and telling her I loved her and what a wonderful man he’d been, which was true. 

At first they lied to me and said the ex-Peace Corps woman—the woman in Santa Livia, the one I’d liked—had made it out okay; but two years later—after two more missions—they admitted she hadn’t, that she’d been one of five Americans who’d died in the city because the WHO’s medical shipment to the center of the epidemic took ten days, not three; and the five were sick and so they couldn’t be evacuated. We’d delayed the WHO’s shipment, of course. It was easy to do. I’d killed her. That was the truth of it. I hadn’t delayed the shipment, but I’d killed her. 

It was knowing that she’d died that made me do what I did in the city of—the city of Zaquitos. I’m sure it was. It wasn’t a young woman, though. It was a boy, one who looked like a kid I’d played with—a friend—in the fourth grade in Florida, when my dad was stationed there. In the next country I was sent to I saw a lot of young women who were beautiful. Maybe their arms had little nicks and scars from a hard life. Maybe they were dirty from the dust and heat, but they were beautiful. People are beautiful wherever they are, whether it’s war or peace or famine or floods they’re living in. But it wasn’t a woman I decided to save, it was a boy. I remember thinking:
This is someone’s kid. You’re going to have kids someday, Matt—if you’re lucky, if you make it through this—and this is someone’s kid.