The Nirvana Plague (19 page)

Karen sat listening to the drone of news, watching Roger in the chair beside her, still doodling on his pad of paper. He’d been at it all day. She couldn’t comprehend how she and the strange familiar man sitting here beside her could be part of the same world of deceit and destruction there in the news.

On the table between them, the phone rang. It was the downstairs door.

“Hello?”

A male voice responded: “Oh, hello! Is this, uh — this must be Roger’s wife? Karen, right?”

She didn’t recognize the caller. Jesus, now what? “Who are you?”

“Oh, hey, I work at the hospital. My name is Miles. I, uh, I just wondered how Roger was doing.”

Karen walked over to the window and looked down. No new cars in the street. “What hospital?”

“Joplin, ma’am. Where Roger goes. I’m an orderly.”

At this point anything even mildly out of the ordinary hit Karen as an intolerable outrage.

“What is it you want?” she said impatiently, adding, half to herself, “What time is it?”

She looked back at the clock on the Newsline screen. 2:52 p.m.

“I just wanted to check how Roger was doing, ma’am. It’s about three o’clock, I guess. I’m sorry to bother you. I know he was quarantined. All the five patients are. I know Roger a long time now, though I don’t see him much.”

Karen was looking at Roger, who was now looking at her.

“Miles,” Roger said. “Miles doesn’t understand either. But he’s a good man.”

Karen knew that Roger couldn’t possibly hear the voice on the line. How did he know? Had he somehow called Miles without her knowing it and invited him over?

Roger’s eyes warmed sympathetically. “Don’t worry,” he said, like a request.

“Ma’am?” Miles said in her ear. “Do you mind if I come up? It’s kinda cold out here.”

She was still looking at Roger, who had returned to his sketch. She buzzed the door open. She heard the old stairs creaking as Miles climbed up. She went out to greet him.

“Evening, ma’am,” he said, sticking out a big flat hand. “We never met really, but I see you round the hospital whenever Roger is on the ward. My name is Miles Reeves.”

She shook his hand mechanically. It engulfed hers.

“You can’t come in, Miles.”

He smiled. “I figured that. But I also figured you’d be here, so I reckoned I’d take the train up anyway. I just got off work at the hospital.”

“Did he know you were coming?”

“Roger? Nah. He don’t know. Why?”

“He didn’t call you?”

“Call me? No, ma’am! He’s not allowed to make calls, is he?”

“How’d he know you were downstairs then? Did you yell up from the street?”

Miles looked at her funny. “Yell up from the street?” He pulled a red knit cap off his head. “Ma’am, he don’t know I’m here.”

There was something about Miles that she couldn’t help but like.
He’s a good man.

“You came all the way up here from Joplin?”

“Yes, ma’am. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

“Would you like a drink?”

Miles grinned. “That’d be fine! Damn cold outside.”

“All I have is wine.”

“Wine is fine.” He said it like it was a little song.

Karen went back inside and returned with two clean glasses and a bottle of red she’d uncorked earlier. They sat down on the top step and she poured.

They drank and talked about Roger. Miles wanted to know how he was doing. Karen tried to answer, but soon gave up.

“I don’t really know how he is,” she said. “I mean, compared to what? To how he was before? Or to normal people? What’s normal? After fifteen years of living with Roger, I know I don’t know what normal is anymore. I wonder if anybody really does. Look how we live. What’s normal about this? The world’s falling apart around us. Is this how people are supposed to live?”

Miles put on his big threatless smile. “Don’t you think he’s better? Don’t you think how he is now is better than how he was before?”

“You mean, under house arrest?” she snapped back.

Miles shrugged helplessness. “But he
is
different now. You know.”

“I know. I think his voices have stopped.”

“You sure he won’t stay home by himself?”

“He never has,” she said. “Course, it never mattered before.”

“Maybe Roger should come back to the ward.”

Karen shook her head stubbornly. “No. He’s better here. Would you want to live at that place?”

“I do.”

“I mean really.” She was still shaking her head. “He’d be in isolation.”

“Yeah. The other four are. Dr. Alexander is trying to get the government doctor let us put them all together. Being alone will just make them more cra—
agitated
.”

“If he was there, I couldn’t protect him. God knows what those bastards might try to do next. — You married, Miles?”

“No, ma’am. I was. Divorced.”

“Lot of that going round.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please call me Karen.”

On the floor beside them, Karen’s phone chimed. She picked it up and answered. “Hello.”

“It’s Ally. I’m downstairs.”

“Come on up!”

Karen buzzed her in. They continued talking on the phone as she came up.

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Karen got up and went back inside the apartment for another glass, still talking on the phone. Miles stood up too.

“Miles Reeves is here,” she said. “Do you know Miles? From the hospital?”

“We’ve met.”

“I’m sorry I was such a bitch yesterday.”

“That’s all right. We were both a little keyed up. — Hello, Miles. Haven’t seen you in a long time. How have you been?”

“I’ll be out in a second,” Karen said, and clicked off.

When she returned to the corridor, Miles was sitting on the top step again, Ally a couple of steps lower down, her knees drawn up under a long dark skirt. Karen sat down next to Miles and handed Ally her glass of wine.

“What are you doing here this time of day?” Karen said.

“It’s slow this time of day. Bonnie can hold down the fort till the dinner rush starts. Anyway, I can’t concentrate.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Miles, did you know about Dr. Marley going overseas?”

He looked up surprised. “Overseas? I thought he was in Washington.”

“He was.”

“He called me yesterday,” Ally said, “and told me he was going overseas with his group.”

“Going overseas where?”

“He didn’t know. Some kind of war zone.”

He looked at her, incredulous. “To a war zone?”

“Yes. But he didn’t say which one.”

He dropped his head, shaking it slowly. “God
damn
,” he said.

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“They’re chasing this disease,” Ally said.

“If it is a disease,” Karen said.

“They want to see it first hand.”

“This IDD thing?” Miles said. “It’s happening other places?”

“It must be,” Ally said.

“God damn! It must be happening to normal people too. It must be happening to guys on the line!”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“That would explain some things,” Karen said. “If normal people are developing the disease, then maybe there are many more cases than we think. That would explain the CDC getting involved all of a sudden, the police, the quarantine.”

“Not to mention all this cloak and dagger business with Carl.”

“What if it’s breaking out on the front lines?” Miles said. “Think about that. Jesus, that’d put a kink in the game plan, wouldn’t it!”

“What do you mean?” Karen said.

“Look at how they act when it happens. If soldiers started acting like that—”

“They’d stop fighting.”

“I’ll drink to that!” Miles said.

They touched glasses. The cheap plastic tumblers Karen had served had no clink. They thudded.

“I don’t believe in IDD,” Karen said. “I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with depersonalization. I’ve been doing some research today. I’ve got nothing else to do. And I had a very strange interaction with Roger this morning. Over a bowl of tomato soup. You should check out the DSM5 definition of ‘depersonalization.’ It’s just nonsensical doubletalk. I don’t think psychiatrists ever really know what’s wrong with anyone. They just settle for one description or another. I think Carl settled for ‘depersonalization’ because of all the diagnoses in the database it was the least bad description of how Roger and the others were acting.”

“So what do
you
think is wrong with them?” Ally said.

“I don’t think anything is
wrong
with them. Not everything that’s different is bad.”

“See,” Miles said, “that’s what
I
was saying!”

“The DSM5 definition says that in some cultures experiences of depersonalization are deliberately induced as part of a spiritual practice. I suppose it is referring to trance states, or whatever. Then it says, but those cases shouldn’t be confused with ‘true’ depersonalization. What the hell is
true
depersonalization then? It’s like saying if you tried to catch a cold on purpose then you don’t really have an infection. It’s just bullshit.”

“When Carl first told me about IDD,” Ally said, “I didn’t really get the depersonalization thing either. The more he talked about it, the more it sounded like something else. If we lived in a culture that generally accepted the idea of spiritual awakening, I don’t think Roger would be in quarantine right now. He’d be on a talk show.”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “That kind of talk gives me the creeps.”

“What kind of talk?”

“Spiritual awakening. Enlightenment. Nirvana. All that stuff. Sounds like a lot of hocus pocus to me.”

“More so than the DSM5?”

Miles laughed.

“Carl didn’t think much of my idea either,” Ally said. “It used to be different. There was a time when he didn’t think I was … radical.”

“Well I don’t know about enlightenment, Miss Ally,” Miles said, “but I do know these five patients a long time now, and every one of them seems better off now than they did before.”

Ally looked away, picking a bit of lint off her skirt.

“Did you ever see that movie about Oliver Sacks who discovered that dopamine let people awake from a catatonic state after they’d been asleep for decades? It was called
The Awakening,
or something like that. In a different world Carl would have made a name for himself by discovering a cure instead of a disease.”

“But what is it a cure for?” Karen said. “I don’t see the connection between schizophrenic patients in a psychiatric hospital and soldiers on the line.”

“
Fear,
” Miles said.

He said it with such force the two women were startled.

“Pure shit fear,” he said. “It’s terrible to be in the hospital. It’s the same routine day after day, all day long, nothing to do, except you never know what’s going to happen next. And that’s what being on the line is like. You spend your life sitting around bored out of your mind, and just hoping and praying to God Almighty that nothing interesting happens, cause if it does, you know you’re going to be scared shitless.”

“You were in combat, Miles?” Ally said.

“Yes, ma’am. I wish to God I never had seen some of the stuff I saw. Stuff nobody should ever have to see. Stuff you wouldn’t believe could be real. And it’s all such bullshit!”

Miles opened his coat. He was still wearing his hospital scrubs. He pulled up his shirt. A series of pale, ragged scars splattered across the dark skin of his ribs and abdomen.

Karen winced when she saw it.

“Proximity mine,” he said. “My buddy tripped it. Blew his body to bits. These scars is his bones. I was in the hospital for five weeks. Course, he never knew.”

“That’s horrible,” Ally said.

“Plenty buddies kill each other out there. Same as my buddy almost killed me. He didn’t mean to trip that mine and blow up all over me, but he did. It’s all just the same as that. You can’t help killing each other.”

He grew more emotional as he talked, his wide eyes glistening with feeling.

“It’s not like what people think. It’s not like how they tell it on the news. You know, they make it sound like there’s a battlefield and a frontline and all that shit, but there ain’t. Cause it ain’t like that. There’s no front. There’s no, like, zone. There’s just a bunch of dudes hiding from each other, trying not to blow themselves up, cause everybody’s blind and deaf and scared absolutely fucking shitless. There’s no line. The fight is everywhere all the same time. And everybody got shields and fog and jamming and EM disrupters and shit like that. Even little countries got all that crap. The technology is too cheap, too easy to get.”

He shook his head, and stomped his heel on the step. “There’s no
line
when you can’t
find
nobody. And you don’t
want
to find nobody, cause you have to kill em before you know who they are, else they will damn sure kill you. So what are you going to do? Only thing you can do is lay down and hide. There’s just, it’s just—”

Ally stood up abruptly. “I have to go now, I have to get back.”

She started down the stairs quickly.

Miles got up, reached out toward her uncertainly. “Wait, Miss Ally. I’m sorry, I—”

But Ally did not look back.

“Thanks for the wine,” she called back as she rounded the landing below and disappeared.

They heard the door downstairs close behind her.

“That was stupid,” Miles said. “I’m stupid.”

“She’ll be all right,” Karen said. “You didn’t mean to.”

Miles sat down again, heavily. “Dr. Marley is all right. He’s a good doctor. He’s not like most of them. — I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but I hope they don’t go up. I hope they stay away from the action.”

Marley lurched out of sleep. Found himself sitting up. Blackness. He couldn’t understand where he was. He heard a voice. Someone was very close to him.

“Get up, sir!”

He felt himself grabbed by the back of his shirt and hauled to his feet in the darkness.

I’m in the mountains, he thought.

There was a terrible uproar of sound all around him. Thudding and thumping, deep and urgent.