The Gemini Virus (23 page)

The inside was inviting and well kept, but hardly unique. There were a dozen cramped booths, a long meat case, an overhead menu board, and a Coca-Cola cooler with sliding doors. A pair of ceiling fans spun at low speed, efficiently distributing the scents of fresh ham, hot tomato soup, and toasted garlic bread. The actual Nelly was an aging hippie with a ponytail and narrow rectangular glasses. She wore a white apron tied at the back, ran both the meat slicer and the cash register, and smiled unceasingly.

Cara watched her with tepid interest from booth number 6, situated next to the snack rack and well away from the panoramic front window. This was the third straight day they’d come here, the most notable difference this time being that Michael was absent; he had to interview a newlywed couple in West Milford and was planning to eat on the run.

“
Spaceballs
was funny,” she said, turning back to the roast beef sub lying on the plate in front of her. “That’s one I liked.”

Ben nodded enthusiastically as he guided a dangling shred of lettuce back into his mouth. “That was one of the best.”

“Michael insisted I watch it, and I admit it was good.”

The topic of the moment was Mel Brooks movies. Michael and Ben had OD’d on them in their Chapel Hill days. What topic came next was impossible to predict; the only rule, they had agreed, was no shop talk. This was the only break they got from it during their waking hours. Cara was particularly adamant about this now that most of the once-healthy animals in the lab were in advanced stages of the illnesses their human hosts had given them and were suffering horribly.

“
The Producers
was maybe his best,” Ben said.

“Didn’t catch that one.”

“No?”

“No, but it’s on the list. The one Michael made for me.”

“It’s worth seeing, believe me. What about
Young Frankenstein
?”

“That was the only one I’d seen already. A friend in college rented it. We sat in her dorm room and watched it on a Friday night.”

Ben grinned. “So you don’t remember much of it, right? Bombed out of your skull, were you?”

Cara did not return the smile; the thought of someone assuming she was a typical drunken college kid struck her as deeply offensive. She never cared much for alcohol and hadn’t touched a drop all through her time at the University of Chicago.

“No, I watched it to the end. It wasn’t too bad. My mind was on other things, though. I was studying all the time.”

At first she didn’t know why she’d added this last proclamation. Then she did—her aunt Beverly and uncle Sid had gone into crippling debt to see that she received the best education available, and there was no way she was going to blow it by getting blasted every weekend like most of those losers. She wanted to make sure that was perfectly clear to Ben. She liked him—liked him a lot, in fact. But she wanted to be sure he understood she wasn’t the type who wasted her time, money, and brain cells on booze, nor someone who took a cavalier attitude toward precious opportunities provided by saintly relatives.

Ben picked up on this and promptly said, “I know, I was just kidding around. Michael told me a long time ago that you were an excellent student.”

“Three-point-eight GPA and a regular on the Dean’s List, baby.”

“Very impressive.”

“Mmm … thanks.”

He got the feeling she wanted to say something else, something like
Damn right
or
Better believe it,
but then erred on the side of diplomacy.
Did Michael teach her that, too?
he wondered, studying her. She wasn’t an easy read; she had thicker walls than Fort Knox. He had a pretty good idea why, too. In the year and a half that she’d been Michael’s assistant, Ben had learned a few things. Michael hadn’t received much of the information directly, of course; she was predictably stingy when it came to personal details. But there had been an interview process, and there were records.

First there was the agonizing death of her father, a dedicated and idealistic physician who went to Africa to combat the Marburg virus. Somehow, in spite of meticulous precautions, he caught it himself and was dead after two weeks of unimaginable suffering. Then her mother, who was consumed in the wake of depression and never recovered, leaving fourteen-year-old Cara to fend for herself. She inevitably hooked up with the wrong crowd, leading to a nightmarish odyssey of excessive drinking, hardcore drugs, unprotected sex, and other horrors. That phase of her life resulted in two arrests and one near-fatal accident involving a stolen car.

With the aid of her kindhearted aunt and uncle, she restacked her priorities and gained acceptance into medical school. There she discovered a natural gift for research, an inherited trait from her late father, and blossomed into one of the school’s outstanding students. Exuberant letters from professors and counselors coalesced into a lavish chorus of praise. Their only reservations, predictably, concerned her ongoing emotional withdrawal.
But Michael has been working on that, too,
Ben decided.
He’s one of the most patient and generous people on this Earth, and he’s the perfect mentor for her
. Then he thought,
And she might be perfect for him, too, in some ways.…

“No, seriously,” he said, “Chicago is a tough school. A lot of kids don’t make it through.”

She nodded, the anger forgotten. “I saw that happen a lot.”

“Do you miss being there? Do you miss your friends?”

“Sometimes. I didn’t like the city that much. Not Chicago in particular, just cities in general.”

“More of a suburban type?” he asked. She made a face, which amused him to no end. “Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, hot dinners on the table when hubby gets home—” She was sticking her finger in her mouth in a gagging gesture. “Babies crawling everywhere, loading up their diapers.” He was shaking with laughter now, enjoying the escalating absurdity of it.

“Yeah, that’s me. ‘Yes, dear,’ and ‘Whatever you say, honey,’ and ‘Stop calling your brother a penis, Jonathan.’ That sounds great.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“Just shoot me now.”

“No husband? No kids? Never?”

She drew a sip of her soda. “I never say ‘never’ to anything, but I’ve got no such plans at present.”

“It’s not a bad deal if you find the right person.”

“That’s what I hear. What about you? Do you think you’ll ever find the right person?”

“Haven’t yet,” he replied. Cara took note of his demeanor and saw nothing, either in the way he answered the question or in the subtleties of his body language, to suggest the kind of discomfort natural to someone who had gone to great pains to hide his homosexuality.
And the mystery continues,
she thought.

“But my parents had a great marriage,” he said, “so I believe it’s possible.”

“I agree with that. I don’t think it’s im
possible
.” She took another bite of her sub, chewed it contemplatively, then said, “And what about Michael? What’s his deal with marriage?”

Ben’s smile fell like a Venetian blind whose clutch had snapped. Cara noticed this and realized she was on to something.

“Come on, I know you know stuff.” She lowered her voice. “He won’t tell me anything. He gets tighter than a clam’s butt.”

“I know a little,” Ben said somberly, breaking eye contact. “But nothing I should share.”

“Please?”

He toyed with his salad before shaking his head. “No, I’m sorry. That’s Michael’s business.”

Now it was Cara’s turn to do the studying. Ben was serious; that much was obvious. She’d never seen him so sensitive about anything, and she was mildly surprised by it. It seemed to run counter to his easygoing reputation.

“I guess it’s a touchy subject,” she said, hoping to sound casual enough to wave off some of the tension.

“Yeah,” Ben said, “you could say that.”

Whenever he thought about this aspect of Michael’s life, his mind always reached for the same memory. It was in June of 1982, less than a year after Michael’s return from Yambuku. Ben had been invited to attend a banquet where Michael was due to receive the Outstanding Contributions to Epidemiology Methods Award from the American College of Epidemiology. It was in recognition of the field strategies he had conceived to make the Africa trip more efficient, resulting in the discovery of the virus’s origin in an unusually short time. It was remarkable for someone so young to be given such an honor.

Michael did not appear at the ceremony, and every one of the 234 attendees knew why. With no choice, Ben had to accept the award in his place, speaking off the cuff as he gave the most difficult speech of his life. After that night, the epidemiological world did not hear from Michael Beck again for nearly sixteen months. And when he emerged from his self-imposed exile, he was treated not with scorn but with admiration, sympathy, and a collective sigh of relief.

“I wouldn’t dig too deep,” Ben counseled.

“I won’t.”

“Professionally, he is a true genius in every sense of the word. He never forgets a stat, learns faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, and processes information like a computer. And what’s more, he’s so natural at it that he makes it look
easy
. But that’s the working side of the man. The other half, well … He thinks the world of you, but I wouldn’t push it.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

Ben smiled again. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s natural to be curious. You just have to remember one thing about Michael Beck—and this is all I’m going to say.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s
haunted,
okay? And haunted men are … well, delicate.”

“I understand.”

“Okay.”

From there the conversation quickly returned to the filmography of Mel Brooks, then petered out when the latest casualty updates crawled across the bottom of the flat-screen monitor that was showing CNN high in one corner of the room.

THIRTEEN

Andrea Jensen was no longer able to look at herself, and not just because she had covered the cheval mirror in the bedroom with a large blanket. The blisters and pustules were everywhere now and becoming engorged with fluid. The swelling, too—her hands, legs, and face looked as though they’d been inflated with an air pump. The facial enlargement was occurring disproportionally, giving her a freakishly lopsided look. Her left eye was shrinking into a hill of pus-bloated tissue, and the right cheek was beginning to sag. She was in Stage Two—and so was Chelsea, who was sitting in cool-water bath down the hall and sobbing loudly.

Dennis stood there with the cell phone pressed to his ear. He was coughing every few seconds and sweating continuously.

“Come on, come on!…”

He snapped the phone shut and walked in a small circle by the bed. Andi was sitting on the other side, watching him.

“Where the hell
is
she?”

He hadn’t been able to get his sister for the last two hours. He tried her station number on the third floor of Brick Memorial, her home number, and her cell. She had never been the type to dodge a call, and certainly never from him.
Something’s wrong,
he thought.
Something’s happened
. He kept pacing and cursed under his breath, enraged that everything in his world had fallen apart so swiftly. In times like this, he seriously wondered if recognizing God’s existence was a matter of faith or folly. He knew that sounded childish, but he couldn’t stop from being angry about the unfairness of it. He had played it straight all his life—worked hard and kept within reasonable ethical boundaries, gave an abundance of love and attention to his children, never fooled around on his wife, paid his taxes, always crossed at the green … and yet this had happened.
Being a good person has really paid off,
he told himself, one bitter sentiment amid a swirl of others. His mind was racing right now, throwing out hundreds of random thoughts. When he considered what Andi and Chelsea were going through, he felt a fury that bordered on madness.

“We can’t sit and do nothing,” Andi said, her speech slightly distorted by the heavy cheek and likely to get worse. “We should go to Catskills Regional
now
.”

“I know … but they still don’t have any treatment or vaccine or anything. What are they going to
do
?”

They had tried every radio and TV station, surfed through every major website, yet there was no news of a breakthrough. No vaccine, no medication, nothing to ease the suffering. Professionals working on the infection all around the world, investing thousands of hours and millions of dollars—and still nothing.

“They said they were letting people try different things if they wanted,” Andi reminded him. “If you signed the waivers, you could have some experimental drugs.”

“Great. Our family turned into human guinea pigs.” He leaned down, hands on his thighs, and coughed mightily. Some greenish spittle flew out and landed in a cluster of prim little dots on the rug. After he’d wiped his mouth with a handkerchief that was looking increasingly vile, he said, “I don’t want the kids to become lab specimens.”

They couldn’t hear Billy over Chelsea’s persistent wailing, but Dennis went in every ten minutes or so to check on him. He had vomited puddles of phlegm twice now and had a fever of 102 degrees F; a number that would likely move up before it went down. Now he was lying in his room with his favorite blanket, his stuffed Ernie doll, and his third pair of pajamas. Scooter lay on the floor beside him, his paws primly together and his brown eyes wide and watchful as he absorbed the tension.

“What are the options?” Andi said. “We sit here and just wait? We just
let it happen
?”

Dennis covered his face with his hands and took a deep breath. He was having trouble concentrating, a problem with which he was not familiar. At work, he could focus with such intensity that he usually had to be jarred out of it. Now, though, he couldn’t seem to put his thoughts in a straight line.

He was just about to respond, when Chelsea came into the room, dripping wet and wrapped in a towel. The cool bath had robbed her of all color, leaving her skin a ghostly white in vibrant contrast to the broad red splotches. The facial swelling in her case had started around the lower jaw, and her bottom lip protruded to the point where it looked as though she were pretending to be an old man.