The Nirvana Plague (33 page)
“Are you all right?” Ally said. “I mean, considering?”
Karen tried her phone then dropped it on the table with a clatter. “It’s broken,” she said. “Piece of junk.”
Ally offered Karen her expensive little phone. “You can use mine. It’s indestructible.”
Karen shook her head. “No, but I need to ask another favor. Can you take care of the cat for a while?”
“Where are you going?” Ally said, her clear eyes sparkling in the uneven light.
“I’m going to Alaska. I’m going to get Roger. — Though I seem to have lost my car.”
“Take mine,” Ally said with no more hesitation than that with which she’d offered her phone.
Somehow it didn’t seem a remarkable gesture. But still.
“No,” Karen said. “No, I couldn’t.”
Ally smiled mischievously. “No,” she said. “Not
my
car. — Let’s take Carl’s Mercedes!”
“Let’s take Carl’s Mercedes? To Alaska? Together?”
“Sure! The cat can come too.”
Karen suddenly felt almost hysterically happy. Her emotions were out of control. “All right then!” she said, trying not to burst out laughing. “North to Alaska!”
“All right then!”
“It’ll take us a week.”
“Better pack some food.”
Karen helped Ally behind the counter pack a cooler full of food from the shop’s stock of delicacies. The rest would have to be left to spoil. They worked by the light of the television.
REPORTER: What is the likelihood that someone coming into contact with someone who has it will get it?
CDC SPOKESMAN: That’s a very difficult number to pin down, because we don’t know how it spreads. We have no idea what causes one person to get it and another one not. New cases do seem to occur in clumps, but nobody knows why. We don’t even know whether or not that’s just a statistical anomaly.
REPORTER: But, if it’s true that many people who are exposed to it don’t ever catch it, then doesn’t that indicate there is a limit to how widely it will spread? Isn’t it fair to say that sooner or later, everyone who
can
get it,
will
get it?
CDC SPOKESMAN: Yes. But the question is how many people
can
get it? Is it ten-thousand? a hundred-thousand? a million? a billion?
REPORTER: So how many people could possibly get it? What do the experts think?
CDC SPOKESMAN: We just don’t know.
“But what if it’s just nothing at all?” Ally said, spooning cold pasta into a plastic tub. “What if it’s all a big misunderstanding?”
Karen dropped a slab of goat cheese into the cooler.
“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” she said, shaking her head. “People aren’t acting the way they’re
supposed
to act. So it’s a problem. It must be stopped. People must behave. I got a lesson in that today.
Disorderly conduct.
That’s what I’m guilty of. Not being orderly. Not taking orders. Not playing nice. — I’m guilty as charged, Your Honor. Guilty as sin. So sue me.”
Before they left, the clip of Roger and Marley was repeated. They sat down to watch it again.
PATIENT:
[Looking up.]
How is who? Who is how?
DOCTOR: I’m fine. How are you?
PATIENT: Who says how? Who says you are how you are?
This time, Karen recorded it on her tablet.
PATIENT:
[Banging the table with the cast on his right arm.]
Why do you ask questions you already know?
[The Doctor jumps — but only slightly.]
PATIENT: Why do you make a problem out of everything?
DOCTOR: I can see you’re upset.
PATIENT: No, you can’t! You’re blind as a brick! If you
could
see, you
could
see how to ask a sensible question.
As the two women watched the dialog unfold again between the husband in the doctor’s coat and the husband in the patient’s scrubs, it started to look and sound more and more ridiculous. It was like watching an absurdist parody of a psychiatric session. As it played out, they found themselves starting to giggle at it.
PATIENT: Why? Why? — What kind of why why do you mean mean, doctor doctor?
DOCTOR: Do you know where you are right now? Do you know what this place is?
PATIENT: You don’t answer my questions, because you don’t expect me to answer yours. If you expected me to answer yours, you wouldn’t ask me others. If you expected me to answer yours, I’d expect you to answer mine. These aren’t real questions. They’re little games. Little games. Who is playing these little games? You or me? Me or you? Who who who?
It was as if the two parts had been pasted together from two different dialogs. It was like each of them was talking to someone who wasn’t there at all — but one of them didn’t know it.
PATIENT: Are you an android? You talk like a computer. All the words in the right place, but all your words are empty. Empty, empty.
DOCTOR: No, I’m a psychiatrist.
PATIENT:
[Bursts out laughing.]
Apples and oranges!
[Roaring.]
Oranges and apples!
Ally started laughing.
Karen stopped trying not to.
PATIENT:
[Seriously.]
I’m an android too, you know. We can be androids together. We can play the doctor-patient-android game. You can question me with doctor-android questions, and I can answer you with patient-android answers. You start.
DOCTOR:
[Tentatively.]
What question would you like me to ask you?
PATIENT:
[Banging table again, hard.]
Good one! Good start! Very convincing!
[Mechanically.]
I
would like
you
to ask
me
what
I
would like
you
to ask
me
.
DOCTOR:
[Glances at camera again .]
Well—
PATIENT:
[Turns toward camera/mirror, grins devilishly, continues speaking with exaggerated mechanical voice.]
I
would like
you
to ask
me
what
I
would like
you
to ask
me
what
I
would like
you
to ask
me
what
I
would…
They were both helplessly crying with laughter by now. Ally fumbled with her tablet through her tears and tapped the television off.
The only light left in the room was the last frame of Karen’s recording of the clip, frozen on the face of her tablet like an art lesson in narrative portraiture — Roger facing the viewer, talking through a huge smile, Marley warily ignoring the camera.
“Look at them!” Karen said, getting her breath.
“Look at them!” Ally cried. “It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen!”
Karen blew her nose into a napkin. “I think we might be losing our minds.”
“Good riddance!” Ally shouted.
“Did you see Roger laughing? He was happy, Ally! I haven’t seen him laugh like that in a long, long time.”
“Well, he’s obviously got a very dangerous disease!”
“Yes, and where can I get it!”
Ally was still wiping her eyes. “I hear they have it up there in Alaska,” she said.
“Should we let Carl know we’re coming?”
Ally shook her head. “No. He won’t like it. And we don’t know who might be listening. But, since you broke your phone, why don’t you forward your calls to mine, just in case.”
They left straightaway, in the middle of the night. Karen couldn’t stand to wait till morning. And she was afraid the authorities might come looking for the camera she’d pitched out the window.
They went to Karen’s place first. Ally waited in the living room, while Karen went into the bedroom and stuffed several changes of clothes into a couple of trash bags. When she came out, Ally was sitting in Roger’s chair, flipping through the pages of Roger’s sketchpad. The cat was sitting on the back of the chair purring, looking as if she was reading over Ally’s shoulder.
“Yours?” Ally said, looking up.
“Roger’s. Let’s take it with us.”
She tossed the sketchpad into her book bag with her tablet, soap, toothbrush, and other odds and ends. They stuffed the cat into a box, and carried everything down to the car.
She figured the chances were low that she’d ever see this place again. She didn’t want to.
They drove all the way out to Ally’s house in the suburbs to switch cars. Ally packed a suitcase and threw it into the trunk.
It was after three o’clock in the morning when they finally set off on the three-thousand–mile road to Alaska in Marley’s beautiful black Mercedes Benz.
They made ten miles before they were stopped.
Ally took first turn at the wheel.
All the automated tollbooths on I-94 were closed. All lanes were being funneled through a single booth manned by an ancient attendant. Traffic was backed up for a quarter of a mile, even at this early hour. Karen put TrafficWatch on the radio and learned that the toll road was closed to everyone not bearing a quarantine clearance. Karen had hers, so they stayed in line.
It took them half an hour to get up to the tollgate.
Two state police officers sat in a patrol car beyond the booth. All the automated lanes were blocked with concrete barriers. More barricades defined a return lane for unapproved cars to cross over to the opposite side. A lot of cars were going back.
The attendant held out a gloved hand and asked for their Q-certs through a surgical mask.
Ally presented Karen’s cert.
“What about hers?” said the attendant, indicating Ally’s passenger.
“That is hers.”
“What about yours then?”
“I haven’t been in quarantine.”
He extended the card back to her, unexamined. “No cert, no pass,” he said.
Ally didn’t take it yet. “How can I have a quarantine cert when I haven’t been quarantined?”
“No cert, no pass,” he repeated, wiggling the card in her face.
Ally took it.
He waved toward the return lane to the left beyond the booth. “Go out that way.”
Ally smiled reasonably. “Look, I haven’t been exposed. If I haven’t been exposed, I’m not a risk, right?”
The attendant glanced over his shoulder at the police. “Move along, please.”
“So, how many people have you actually let pass today?”
Karen noticed the police were starting to take an interest. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’ll find another way.”
In the back seat, the cat meowed inside her box.
Ally turned in between the return-lane barriers in front of the patrol car and started back.
Karen watched the police watch them go by. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Ally said. “So now what?”
“What if they run your plates?”
“So what? I don’t think Carl’s wanted in this state anyway.”
Karen ignored the joke. “What if they connect the dots between Carl’s car, Carl, his patient Roger, and me?”
“What if they do? Nobody’s broken the law. Seems like a stretch to me.”
“You haven’t been through what I have lately.”
Ally pulled out onto the southbound side of the highway, back toward the city. “So what do you want to do now?”