Code Orange (2 page)

If Mitty ever had extra money, he gave it to subway performers. He loved those guys. He loved the really bad sax player and the touchingly hopeful string quartet. He loved the gospel singers and the trumpeters, the mimes and the guy who painted himself silver and pretended to be a statue. Mitty always dropped money in their cups. Every time he heard a subway musician, he looked forward to the day when he too could concentrate on music and not worry about class.

Books, thought Mitty, frowning, and a faint book-type thought penetrated his mind. He turned down the volume on his music in order to process the thought.

Mitty's mother was an interior decorator with a peculiar specialty: creating libraries for people who did not read. These clients turned to Kathleen Blake to provide a warm, rich, British-looking room full of leather, antique
maps, dark velvet and books with gold page edges. Mrs. Blake scoured New York, New Jersey and New England for leather-bound sets of dead English authors. Content didn't matter, because nobody would ever read them. The books just had to have terrific bindings. The week before, she'd bought out the library of some very old— and finally dead—doctor in Wallingford. It had taken two trips in her van to bring back the guy's hundreds of books.

Mitty had unpacked for her. He didn't read if he could avoid it, but when words were directly in front of your face, you couldn't help deciphering them. Hadn't some of the doctor's books been about infectious disease?

Dragging his backpack, which held his laptop, Mitty went down a flight of stairs, crossed the center hall and entered his mother's book room. A nice enough place if you liked books, but Mitty didn't. From across the room, he spotted
Principles of Contagious Disease, Conditions of Infectious Disease, Infectious Illness: Treatment and Containment and A History of Immunology
.

The books were thick and dusty. Mitty picked up
Principles of Contagious Disease
because the leather was soft and gold, like melted butter. He opened to the title page and, remembering he had to have a bibliography, turned one more. The book had been printed in Boston in 1899.

What had anybody known about biology in 1899? Nothing. Every word in this book would be meaningless. Science-wise, 1899 was a joke. He'd be better off to hit the Barnes & Noble when they got back to the city, buy up everything they carried about infectious disease,
pull an all-nighter and fulfill Mr. Lynch's requirements by dawn.

Or not fulfill them. Whatever.

Mitty began to shrug about the paper, as he had shrugged about everything academic this year. But if he failed out of advanced biology his father would go berserk and his mother would throw things. He might even get calls from his sister in grad school. (“Do you realize how you're hurting Mother?”)

Plus there was Olivia's comment a few weeks ago, when he admitted he'd lost the technique of even
hearing
school; he'd glance around and find that the whole school day was over and he couldn't remember what he'd been thinking about all day, or even
if
he'd been thinking.

Olivia said without joking, “Maybe it's very early Alzheimer's.”

Mitty didn't expect to be loved for his brain, but he didn't want to be discarded for his total lack of brain either, so he did not put
Principles of Contagious Disease
back.

He sat cross-legged on the bare wood floor and leafed through the book. (Flipping pages prior to reading took away some of the sting.) First, choose a disease, he told himself.

Faintly he heard the sound of television and knew that his parents were watching something together. Since they had no television tastes in common, one of them was sacrificing for the other. Mitty would rather watch anything, even figure skating, than research an infectious disease he hadn't chosen yet in a book with no useful facts, so he considered heading for the media room. His
fingers felt a raised place in the book. Not a lump, just a thicker area. Mitty turned pages, expecting a folded chart.

It was an envelope.

The envelope was rectangular, an odd size, maybe six inches long and two inches wide. It was mustard yellow, its color preserved by the darkness inside the book. It was labeled on one side. With a fountain pen, someone had written
Scabs—VM epidemic, 1902, Boston
.

The envelope was not and never had been sealed. It was closed with a thin string wound around a stiff paper button. Mitty undid the string and peered in, but the opening was narrow and he couldn't see exactly what was down there. He inverted the envelope over his hand and tapped. The contents slid into his palm.

The stuff really was scabs.

When he was learning to rollerblade and skateboard (New York City, being sidewalk heaven, was perfect for these skills), he was always falling and scraping open his elbows and knees. His mother was always begging him to wear safety pads or else stop dangerous activities altogether, and he was always paying no attention. He never used Band-Aids. It was not until his cuts scabbed over that he could be bothered to notice them at all. There was something about a scab that demanded picking. When he was about eight, Mitty had had almost a full-time hobby of ripping scabs off before the cuts healed so they had to scab over again.

Mitty rubbed one dark crust of old blood between his fingers. It crumbled. Mitty sneezed. The energy of his sneeze made his fingers tighten around the remaining crusts. When he released his grip, only one scab
remained intact. It was darker than the rest, almost black. He dropped the crumbles back in the envelope, dusted his hands briskly and held the dark scab between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. His nose itched. Mitty rubbed his nose with the back of his hand to prevent a second sneeze.

The pages of the book began to turn of their own accord, wanting to close. Mitty had not read the page where the envelope had been resting.

He sniffed the scab. It seemed to have a slight odor, but perhaps that was just the scent of age.

It was truly weird to save your scabs. Even Mitty, who rather prided himself on being weird, had never saved a scab. But probably it wasn't the wounded person saving his own scabs; probably it was some doctor who had once owned this textbook, saving scabs off somebody else's body. Talk about sick.

It was also puzzling. What infectious disease bled? What wound would this scab be from?

Mitty was not familiar with VM, but it occurred to him that if VM could cause an epidemic, it had to be an infectious disease. Mitty brightened. He didn't care if VM had a common name, a long history or a current event. He didn't care if it had ever shown up in New York City or could be used by bioterrorists. He cared only that he had his topic.

A 102-year-old scab could be used as show-and-tell, although that was kind of a second-grade phrase. For high school, Mitty would call this an artifact. A tiny mummified body part—if a scab could be called a body part. Nobody else would come up with that for their report.

First he had to figure out what VM stood for.

VD he knew: venereal disease; he hoped that was not what VM was, because he didn't like thinking about sexually transmitted diseases and didn't want to be known as the guy who researched them. Next he tried to remember the true names of shots you got when you were little. They had just had a class on it, but Mitty had not been listening. OPV was oral polio vaccine. DPT was … diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus.

No VM in that group. Mitty had a brainstorm and turned to the index. There weren't many entries under
V
, and only one
VM
: variola major—which, wonderfully, had an entire chapter to itself.

“Mitty!— yelled his father.

“Here!— Mitty shouted back.

“Your mother wants to leave now!— yelled his father.

There were clues in this shout. His father did
not
want to leave now. He did not want to leave so much that instead of saying “Mom wants,— he was assigning Mom to Mitty—she had become that grim person,“your mother.— Mitty knew that on the drive home, his job was to be on both sides of whatever this issue was.

Roxbury was ninety miles northeast of New York City, and since Dave Blake had always yearned to be a NASCAR driver, they'd get back to the city fast—long before Barnes & Noble closed. Mitty could get new books. He had never pulled an all-nighter, since his commitment to study rarely lasted longer than ten minutes, but he liked the idea of an all-nighter. Olivia routinely stayed up all night studying, even when she'd been studying for weeks in a row already. Now he could boast that he too had worked through the night.

He dropped the scab into the envelope with the crumbles, stuck the envelope back into the book without rewinding the string and threw the book into his book bag. Then, since it was remotely possible that B & N would fail him, he threw in the other three ancient books. They were all worthless, but Mr. Lynch had just specified four books; he hadn't said they had to be worth anything.

Mitty and his father waited patiently while Mitty's mom skittered around the house, checking things nobody else cared about, like leftover milk. At last she was in the car and Mitty's dad took off. Mitty meant to read up on VM, but he fell asleep instead.

Variola major is a virus.

A virus is not precisely a living creature. It has no system for the intake of food or oxygen. It has no personality, no brain. It has one task: to take over the cells of other creatures.

Scab particles were in Mitty Blake's fingerprints. He had wiped them on his cheek and rubbed them against his nose. He had breathed them in.

Every virus, although not quite alive, nevertheless has a shelf “life.” The shelf life of some viruses is known; the shelf life of others is uncertain.

In this case, it was the shelf life of Mitchell John Blake that was uncertain.

“H
ave a nice nap, darling?” asked his mother, reaching over the front seat to ruffle her son's hair.

Mitty stretched happily. He could lie down anytime, anywhere, and sleep soundly for ten hours. Twelve, even. People could sit on him and watch television, have arguments and clean up after a sick dog, and Mitty would never know.

His dad handed over the car keys to the parking attendant while Mitty grabbed his backpack. It was amazingly heavy. What did he have in there—tire irons? He opened the bag. What had been his logic, wasting space on four pathetic—

He had not checked before tossing the books in. There
at the bottom, splayed open—in fact, crushed—was his classroom copy of
Beowulf
. Mitty recalled now that there would be a test on
Beowulf
in the morning. He could not believe this was happening. After he had planned so carefully! There would have been plenty of time to get to the bookstore, take notes …

Naturally he hadn't read
Beowulf yet
. He had a dim recollection that they had been talking about
Beowulf
in class—at least, other people had been talking; certainly Mitty himself had contributed nothing—and he recalled also that it was hard to read, being in some antique, dusty form of English. Or maybe Greek.

“Mitty?” his mother said gently, because he had forgotten to get out of the car.

His parents were partial to huge canvas bags made by L.L. Bean, and when they traveled between the city and the country, these were filled to overflowing with groceries, laundry and extra sweaters. Since Mitty loved anything involving muscle power, he was always ready to lug and carry. He slung a Bean bag over each shoulder, hoisted one in each hand and also managed his backpack.

The driveway up from the public parking lot under their apartment building was steep. Mitty loved steep. He liked the tightening of his leg muscles when he was walking uphill. He passed their building's tiny front garden and said hi to Carlos, the doorman on duty. Mitty's building had doormen and a concierge at the front desk 24/7. Days and evenings, the back service entrance was also manned—this was where packages arrived, dry cleaning or takeout was delivered and moving men schlepped furniture.

A doorman helped with strollers and shopping bags,
carried luggage, gave an arm to old people struggling to get out of cars, closed up wheelchairs, gave directions and, above all, remembered faces. Nobody could wander in. Guests had to stop at the desk, where the concierge would telephone your apartment on the house line and say“Derek's here?” and you'd say“Send him up,” and then Derek could walk around to the elevators. But since the staff did remember faces, pretty soon when Derek came, they knew him and just waved him up.

While his father picked up the mail, Mitty's mother chatted with Eve at the front desk to see if anything interesting had happened since Friday when they had hauled out of town, but nothing had. At last, the three of them were in the elevator, headed for the eighth floor.

Their hall was nondescript. Nobody painted or decorated or hung anything or had wreaths or welcome mats. Nobody's taste was visible. And yet the building never felt musty or unused the way their country house did after a week away. In the apartment building, you could always smell somebody's perfume or dog or dinner, and in the hall, you could hear their television or their arguments. The minute you got inside your own apartment, though, no sound or vibration of neighbors was there with you; you were separate, yet surrounded.