Streams of Babel (28 page)

"That is ... nice thing to say, thank you." But I wish she would not tell me what I do and do not realize. "I did much more at home. Hodji does not tell you all. That is fine. I do not want to make notice of myself. I just want ... to put my fingers to keypad and feel my room to think," I try to explain.

Hodji had been very vague about my background to the Americans, saying no one on the new squad needed to know I was "the Kid" from
Newsweek.
I cannot quite understand his reasoning, but I have heard Roger say many times that with the agents, it is better for the left hand not to know what the right hand is doing. No one can betray the rest that way, he says.

So, I am surprised when she keeps staring and finally says, "You're that legend, aren't you? That track 'n' translate prodigy that the FBI turned up in the Middle East." She is asking because one squad member put two and two together during our meeting and asked the same question. Hodji was there and refused to answer. He should have lied or told the truth. Now she is curious, and I am frustrated.

"I am not Middle Eastern. Pakistan is not part of the Middle East any more than you are part of Canada." I manage not to roll my eyes at American ignorance over the rest of the world's geography. But I do confess, "I was helping my father. That is all."

She watches me more, and I squirm, feeling I will never grow accustomed to American women's unabashed gaze. "Yes, Hodji said your parents ... passed away? Is that right?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry. You must miss them."

Her tone has turned sympathetic. I try to remember if Hodji also told me not to discuss my father. We had been so focused on v-spying just before we left Pakistan that much was left unclear to me. I think that perhaps Hodji had told me that, but I cannot see why USIC should not know I am related to their great technology specialist, and I decide I will tell her what she should not glaze over.

"My father was a very important subcontractor for the FBI," I say. "He make very good v-spy, first in Karachi, then New York City. Plus, they bring him tapes of wiretaps, and he can translate the Indo-European languages for the agents. Then they understand terrorists."

"Are you talking about Ashad Ali Hamdani?" Her whisper is surprised.

I nod with more confidence.

"Ashad Ali Hamdani was your father?"

"Correct."

"You're kidding."

I don't know why she would accuse me of this. "And he die in his asleep. Of the gas—"

"Yes, we all know that name and that tragic accident. I just didn't associate you with that Hamdani. It's a common name. Wow. I've heard 'the Kid' stories. And I've heard of Ashad Ali Hamdani. I just never put them together."

"No one is supposed to know over here that we are related," I say. Then I ask in confusion, "But it is all right for the
squad
to know, yes?"

She keeps staring and does not answer right away. I feel she is searching behind my eyes for something I cannot perceive ... and perhaps I have made a mistake in telling her about my father. But I cannot understand why. She snaps to alertness when the phone rings again. "Hi, Michael ... Gotcha."

She hits her
OFF
button, and her face has changed. "Don't go back to Pakistan, Kid. Especially not today." She starts the car and pulls out of the spot, making the wheels screech. "We've had a tail on VaporStrike for four days now. He's left his house earlier than usual today. He's gone into Trinitron, and he's online with Omar. We'd like you to tell us what they're saying."

I feel my heart pick up speed along with the car. I am waiting for her to thank me for cutting the school, but she is busy trying to keep us safe as she drives very fast.

SCOTT EBERMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
11:35
A.M.

I DON'T KNOW where the thought "Musical Beds" came from as I walked out of intensive care in the morning. My sense of humor was to the left of neg. I had just checked in on Cora. They couldn't have picked some other cube to put her in? Uh-uh. She was in the bed my mother had been in. Now Rain was in Cora's former bed, and because a "contagious" protocol takes precedence over a "gender" protocol, my brother was in the other bed. You wouldn't believe how quickly a hospital snaps into action when the USIC supervisor's daughter is brought in on a stretcher.

It was still hush-hush to outsiders, but the hospital was abuzz. By nine o'clock this morning, there was a budget for "Unknown Infectious Disease." They admitted Owen for observation. The CDC was flying a phlebotomist up from Atlanta, a specialist to study a new batch of our blood every three hours. Dr. Godfrey spent the morning doing nothing but moving
from Cora to Rain and my brother and back again. I had stayed out of his way, afraid he would insist on bedding me down if he knew I was symptomatic. I would have gone nuts if I couldn't move around.

I still argued with myself about the possibility of our mystery germ being airborne, but none of Owen's friends had the slightest symptom, and maybe even I'm prone to convenient thinking. I kept reminding myself that I felt fine today, even after having been up all night with Cora, so I was probably okay. I also reasoned that if I wore gloves and sterile scrubs and added a mask, I was entitled to give in to my bad case of the look-arounds.

The hospital really couldn't argue. They hadn't declared the virus airborne; hence, I was not bound by law to adhere to their wishes.

To declare the germ airborne, their protocol would have forced them to contact the media, and for understandable reasons, they were trying hard to avoid that. One reason is the hysteria factor, which means everyone with anything from a hangnail to last night's bean farts would show up in the ER, wanting reassurance that their symptom was unrelated. You have to be relatively sure your infectious disease is airborne to create that much expense, paperwork hell, and torment for the medics.

And I figured the hospital was pretty sure it
wasn't
airborne. In my mind, USIC thought the germ was waterborne only—and the hospital was listening to them. My evidence was based on oh-so-much USIC presence at the hospital. Imperial and O'Hare showed up at eight in the morning, flashing badges at the front entrance. It must be my intuition that put my look-arounds in the lobby when they arrived. I backed into the gift store and hid behind a magazine as they were led immediately
to the elevator. The doors closed, and I watched where they got off. Godfrey's office was on the fourth floor. Rain was on the sixth. The elevator stopped at four.

This had something to do with poisoned water, and if they thought it was the least bit airborne, Godfrey would have been calling my name over the loudspeaker all morning and forcing me into a containment room. But I'd been walking back and forth from the ICU to Owen and Rain for over an hour as USIC met with Godfrey. The nurses attending Owen and Rain wore gloves and masks, but the door to their room was not even closed.

I stuck my head in warily, scoping for Godfrey, but he was probably still with USIC. My brother was watching television. I looked at Rain's chart rather than at Rain, because I couldn't stand the sight of her scared shitless. Not a Hallmark moment. I looked again at the lines Godfrey had written at 3:00
A.M.
: "infected right ear canal" and "ulcerated lesion." That the blood was coming from her ear and not her brain should have given Rain much relief, but she hadn't grabbed ahold of it yet.

The wad of cotton taped over her ear was less noticeable than her eyes.
You're supposed to know what to do!
they read. I laid the chart back down helplessly.

"Who's winning?" I asked my brother, thinking he'd have something on ESPN, but he had to turn the channel to tell me, "You want NASCAR stats, or tennis in the Bahamas?"

I didn't answer. Nothing had changed on his chart, either. Temperature: 102. All other vitals: normal. I finally let myself plop into the chair beside his bed, and the tension release in my legs made everything heavy, including my head.

"How's Cora?" Owen asked.

"Same."

"She didn't wake up yet?"

"No."

He hit four or five different channels. "Is she
going
to wake up?"

I hadn't made up my mind about that yet. Her brain waves showed coma, but none of her vital organs were shutting down—a good sign.

"Is she in any pain?"

"No," I assured him.

"So, what's wrong with her? I know you know."

I did but hadn't wanted to tell him, because any symptoms Cora developed ominously pointed back to us and what we could develop. He had enough to worry about.

"Because, when she passed out, I was standing right there," Owen persisted. "She shed a bucket of tears but couldn't talk—"

"Yeah, yeah." I decided he deserved the truth. "Dr. Godfrey finally concluded that it was just a delayed reaction to stress that came when she relaxed enough. The problem is, well, serious but painless. It's her blood sugar. It shot through the ceiling. And if it weren't for all this other stuff going on, they would have probably thought she was a diabetic in shock. But she had no history of diabetes. Somehow, Dr. Godfrey knew to look for a blood clot on her pancreas and found it."

He studied the remote. "So how did he know to do that?"

"Do I look like a doctor?"

Owen was in rare form—alert, with flashlight eyes, as fever victims can often be. "Don't give me that. Medical info just like ... seeps in through your pores. I'm ready to hear."

The truth was, Mr. Important, Roger O'Hare, had shown up at around midnight looking disheveled, and he talked to Dr.
Godfrey for half an hour in his office. I had stayed with Cora. When Godfrey came back, he ordered the tests that revealed the clot. I figured O'Hare had brought him some sort of intelligence, probably something he had found out from the CDC about the nature of the poison in the water. I couldn't put anything else together.

I just sighed and went for the truth. "She's on enough blood thinner to keep an elephant from clotting. So long as she doesn't fall out of bed and bleed to death, I can't see anything that's going to kill her," I said, but was afraid to add,
However, this germ seems to be full of surprises.

"I was thinking since I hadn't drunk any tap water in over two days now, that I would be okay. But today, I'm worse. My stomach feels like sludge again. How can that be?"

"Since I've got no MO on the germ, I can't answer that," I said. But I knew that all germs are a life force, and just because you're no longer adding to them, it doesn't mean the ones inside you can't turn their little party into Times Square on New Year's Eve.

Owen was quiet for a while, then asked, "Are we ... bad people?"

"How's that?" I grumbled.

"I don't know, but ... this happened. We're not dreaming it."

He was on to something morbid, the usual. "I don't believe in a vindictive God," I said. "If God was like that, He'd be after me and not you guys."

"Maybe not God, just ... other people.
Poor
people."

His cheeks were dull pink, but his eyes were calming, finally. No delirium.

"
We're
poor," I said. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"We're broke. We're not poor. There's a difference. Lots of
poor people out there really hate Americans. They think we're rich and spoiled and self-absorbed and stupid and all. Obviously, some think it's okay to try to kill us."

Ah, a terrorist conversation. He wanted to know if terrorists could have a decent point. My brother would find it in his heart to sympathize with Jack the Ripper.

"Well, it's
not
okay...," I stammered. "When people declare war, they're not supposed to target civilians. That rule is as old as history ... and besides ... we're not supposed to be thinking that way yet. No one's sure that it's—"

"
You're
sure. You think the water got poisoned. I know you do. I guess maybe I'm just ... starting to think about that. I'm trying to look at myself as a target. I'm wondering what someone has to feel, has to think, to look at me and you and Rain and be all 'Those evil Americans. Do 'em.'"

I grabbed the remote from him. I'd seen him pass up a lightweight boxing match six channels back.

"You think too much," I said. "I'm trying not to think about stuff like that right now. When I do? When I can't help myself? I think of how gratifying it would be to grab some guy like that around the throat, squeeze, and slowly watch his eyeballs hemorrhage. Think of that, if you have to."

"But it hurts less," he replied quickly. "It hurts less to look for sense than to be mad. And if I'm a bad person, I'd like to know it, that's all."

I rolled my eyes past Rain, who was pretending to watch her own TV, and I raised the volume slightly, just in case she was hearing this. Her dad was off playing cowboy. I wished he was here to play father, though he was probably getting better mileage by trying to catch the guys.

"Owen, you are not a bad person," I groaned. "Don't insult me like that."

"How am I insulting you?"

"Because if you're bad, I'm off the charts."

"How can you say that?" He grabbed the remote back again and moved up the channels. "You're always looking out for everybody. You don't have a selfish bone in your body. As for being bad, it depends on who you compare us to. Maybe I look and smell good next to some kids, but next to Joan of Arc or John the Baptist or Gandhi, I'm still your basic scuz wad."

"So ... what, then?" I watched him in exhaustion. "Some group of terrorists decides you're not the next Gandhi, and that gives them the right to poison you? What are you getting at, Owen?"

"I don't know." He put his head back and stared at some high spot on the wall. "I just started to think about this. I just like to understand people. Then I don't have to feel all angry and tense."

"Jesus." I rubbed my burning eyes. It was a prayer, not a cuss. My brother might not like to feel angry and tense, but somehow he could put himself through the tortures of the damned to try to understand guys who might have wanted to whack him.