Virus: The Day of Resurrection (28 page)

“Thank you,” the doctor said. He breathed in deeply, closed his eyes, and lowered his shoulders. “Thank you …”

The inside of his mouth was swollen from night after night without sleeping, and the smoke seemed to get caught in his throat, but oh, it felt good. One good smoke and his hands stopped shaking right away.

“There are rice balls in the office,” the nurse said quickly, taking back the matchbook and the bag of tobacco. “There’s tea in the blue pot and coffee in the red. You need to get some food in your system.”

The nurses walked very quickly. The powder and lipstick had worn off of their ashen faces, their hair was disheveled something awful, and the lab coats they had been sleeping in were wrinkled and faintly darkened with dirt and grime. Their feet were swollen from standing and walking all day—they were on the verge of collapse.

This is just like the war,
the doctor thought as he gazed off into space.

Along the side of a hall crowded with patients, their attendants, and doctors all around, patients were resting on couches and wheeled beds. Among them, there were even babies resting on the tops of wooden fire hose crates. The ones on the floor itself had white sheets pulled up over their heads—they had already died. There were three such corpses at present that had not yet been taken away. The weeping of the children, the sobs of the mothers …

It’s just like it was back then.

The doctor was nearing the age of fifty, and during the Pacific War he had served as an army medic, traveling from central China to the southeast Asian islands of the southern front. At a field hospital with a roof made of nipa palm, they would bring them in after every combat operation: soldiers covered in sweat, mud, blood, and mucus. Then came the rains and with them the mosquitoes and flies, the amoebic dysentery, contagious diseases, festering wounds, the film coating the eyes of living men, the maggots squirming even at the edges of their mouths, the groans of those being tormented by the high fever of malaria, the screams, the weeping, the delirious raving, the strafings by machine gun from enemy fighter planes—Dr. Tsuchiya had been injured near the end of Showa 19 and sent back home to Japan. In Showa 20, he had been assigned new duties on Japanese soil and then at Hiroshima.

This is at least better than it was then. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get that bad.

Burnt, half-naked people had been squeezed tightly together in the gymnasium that the elementary school had used on rainy days, their skin peeling, redolent of blood and pus. There had been weak, crying voices—and screaming voices—of still-living babies with half the skin peeled from their bodies. Young women with pubic hair singed brown from where their clothes had caught fire, and countless shards of glass stuck in bosoms that had looked like the Buddhist Hell of the Mountains of Needles. The new medicine called “cryptocyanin,” which had had not been all that effective …

What’s happened here?!
In the bottom of his heart, the doctor suddenly groaned weakly as he stood in the doorway of the hospital office.
My life is surely going to end amid blood and pus and the moans of my patients.

Exhaustion like a great black bat suddenly unfolded its wings inside his skull, and in an instant his consciousness was receding into the distance. In that instant, all of the innumerable horrors he had encountered over the past thirty years came welling up in his mind. The one that his mind latched onto was that terrible train wreck at Tsurumi. Dr. Tsuchiya had been at a bar near his home in Shinagawa. He had heard about it from a television news update, immediately run to get the medical bag he always took with him on house calls, and rushed over to the site. Nobody had called them, but many doctors had come running from all quarters as soon as they had heard, to work in silence, free of charge. Before the police’s request for assistance had even gone out, nurses had arrived with their families in tow, and the city’s general practitioners had begun treating the injured and seeing to their accommodations. Dr. Tsuchiya thought suddenly of disease and death and of those who battled against it. Because it was true—this really was a battle, after all. An endless, boundless battle. Not just at K Hospital, but right now, at each and every hospital throughout all of Japan, other doctors were fighting the same battle. Just like Dr. Tsuchiya, they were fighting on without sleep or rest, with no time to spare for eating meals, growing so exhausted that they could barely keep standing. And not only in Japan, but all over the world.

Dr. Tsuchiya shut his eyes and between ragged breaths tried to visualize the force strength of his comrades. Presently, the number of general practitioners in Japan numbered around one hundred twenty thousand. A scant hundred twenty thousand! One hundred twenty thousand, for a population of one hundred million. Even adding in the hospital doctors, interns, and nurses, the number still probably wouldn’t break three hundred thousand. As for hospital beds, there were around a million of them—which meant there was one bed for every thirty patients. And not every patient was an influenza case either; there were countless people with other illnesses and injuries as well.

There are too few of us
, thought Dr. Tsuchiya.
But how many doctors would be enough? A hundred million people aren’t all going to grow up to be doctors. Normally, there’re so many of us that some are hardly busy enough to support themselves. But once an epidemic reaches these proportions, there aren’t nearly enough. Maybe it’s time to rethink how we deliver medical care in this country …

Exhaustion suddenly clutched at his heart with icy hands. Dr. Tsuchiya bore it with his brow tightly knitted.

“Won’t you come in and have something to drink?” said Tanabe from Respiratory Medicine at the door.

“Thanks,” the doctor answered at last. “I think I will …”

The doctor’s lounge was being used to examine patients, and even the basement cafeteria was being used for temporary hospital rooms, so there was no choice but to use a corner of the cramped hospital office for taking breaks. In a metal mesh basket was a small mountain of cheap teacups, piled upside-down. A large aluminum kettle and several half-finished cups of tea had been left scattered around on a table that was covered with scratches. There were two large plates of rice balls as well, one of which was now mostly empty.

“Looks like a typhoon blew through here, eh?” Tanabe said with a slight smile as he helped himself to a rice ball. “The Ladies’ Association and the volunteer housewives have been bringing in emergency provisions. Not just for us either; they’re cooking rice for people in the neighborhood too. They’ve been a huge help to families that have been hit by this thing.”

“Emergency provisions, eh?” Dr. Tsuchiya said, smiling just a little. “Japan never changes, does it? My mother told me that in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, she’d often make three thousand rice balls in a single night. To hear her tell it, the palms of her hands would swell up and bleed.”

“But these days they all have electric rice cookers. I hear they’re using the kitchen facilities at elementary schools and kindergartens now. When there are wars or fires or floods, you can always count on them.” Tanabe picked up another rice ball and held it out. “Have one?”

“No thanks. Just coffee for me.”

He poured coffee from the red pot into a cheap teacup and drank. A film of dark grime clung to its surface. It was lukewarm and weak—like drinking muddy water. Even so, to his parched, cracked lips it was a merciful rain from heaven.

“Did you catch the midday news?” Tanabe asked, licking off the grains of rice stuck to his fingers.

“No. What’s happened?”

“The number of deaths has finally hit ten million.”

“That many?” Tsuchiya’s hand froze, holding the teacup.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” muttered Tanabe in a low voice of utter exhaustion. “The mortality rate is thirty percent. You think Japan might end up losing more people from this than it lost in the war?”

“More,” Dr. Tsuchiya said with a nod. “Pretty soon … twice that number.”

“It hasn’t even been two months since this started,” Tanabe said in a strained voice. “Tsuchiya—this is really bad. Do you think this is really even influenza we’re up against here?”

Tsuchiya stared dazedly into the dirty-looking brown liquid in the bottom of his teacup for a moment, then, as if deciding his course of action, filled it to the brim once more. “Tanabe, how’s your wife?” he asked unexpectedly.

“Haven’t seen her in nearly a month,” Tanabe said with a frown and drooping shoulders. “The hospitals over there in Kanagawa are full to bursting too.”

“It’s been a month, has it?” Tsuchiya said vacantly. “I guess it has. After all, look at how dark that shirt collar of yours has gotten.”

“Doctor, yours is even worse,” Tanabe said. “How’s your boy?”

“Sent him off to Yamagata with my wife,” said Dr. Tsuchiya, holding on firmly to his teacup, gripping it tightly with both hands. His body was rocking back and forth just slightly. “I wonder if it’s been a month apart for us too? It’s strange, really. I mean, back when all of this was just starting, I just had this uneasy feeling, so I, ah, ordered a strategic dispersal, you know? Send them away, and it’s less likely to get us all.”

He fell silent then, but after a long pause began to speak again in a murmur, as if talking to himself. “Is it because I’m getting old? My only son … he’s so precious to me. And I’d kept putting my wife off because I didn’t want to be a father. And if this thing gets him too, it would’ve been better if we’d never had him.”

“We first met during the war,” Tanabe said. “A lot of young people died then. Children too.”

“Yeah.” The doctor raised the teacup to his lips. He drank noisily, but his Adam’s apple didn’t move. Coffee ran down his chin and into his collar. He didn’t seem to notice. “Where were you deployed before we met?”

“The Soviet-Manchurian border.” Tanabe rubbed at his eyes. “After that, Siberia. For three, no, four years.”

Dr. Tsuchiya started slowly rocking back and forward again. When Tanabe looked at him, he was shocked to see that the doctor seemed to have aged ten or fifteen years all at once. Sitting there with his exhausted back hunched forward and rounded, holding on to the teacup firmly, he looked almost like a monkey. His skin was pale, dry, and covered with grime, his cheeks were hollow, and his eyes sunken. His jaw hung loose, covered with the whiskers that had started to appear since he’d stopped shaving. He looked like a dead man. The lid above one of his filmy eyes twitched with a nervous tic.

“Why don’t you lie down for just a bit,” said Tanabe.

“No, I can’t do that.”

“What about a shot of glucose?”

“No, I’m all right.”

Tanabe took a long pull on his cigarette. When he exhaled, he felt a great wave of drowsiness overcome him. It felt as if it were about to drag him down into slumber right then and there.

“I hear the research center at J School of Medicine has a problem too. They’re finding golden staph in patients’ bronchial tubes and in the lobes of their lungs again.”

“It was like that with the Asian flu too,” Dr. Tsuchiya mumbled inside his mouth. “If you got pneumonia because of a double infection of those two, you were pretty much out of luck. After all, antibiotics don’t do a thing against staph.”

“Well, the really weird thing is that the staph this time isn’t reproducing well enough to cause inflammation, and it seems to just disappear almost immediately. Come to think of it, don’t you think the number of deaths from complications of pneumonia is rather low this time?”

Dr. Tsuchiya gave a faint nod. “That’s true. This flu really is a strange one. There are even double infections with that parainfluenza I was talking about earlier. There are things about it that don’t make sense if it’s a regular influenza.”

“You think so too, Doctor?” said Tanabe around a harsh cough as he crushed out his cigarette. “Leaving aside the issue of just how bizarre it is that the vaccine has such a weak effect, surely you must find it strange that this thing is wrecking people’s hearts and making them keel over, one after another, without even getting very sick. Do you think that some other, unknown illness may be going around camouflaged by this flu?”

“That’s a … an excellent thought,” Tsuchiya said, speaking very slowly with a yawn that looked as though it might make his jaw creak. “But if it’s viral … it’s probably not something we’ve encountered before.”

“Certainly, people both at home and abroad have suspected such a thing since early on. Even in Japan, I hear they’re using a 2.35 Angstrom electron microscope—the best in the world—to hunt for a contagion.”

“Japan has the best electron microscopes in the world,” said Dr. Tsuchiya in a voice that sounded half asleep. His eyelids were already flickering closed.

“I just wonder if maybe this contagion is conducting a coordinated assault with the influenza virus group. Hiding among viruses we already know about.”

Dr. Tsuchiya was silent for a long moment but at last said, “Interesting,” with a slender thread of saliva hanging from his lower lip. “Very interesting, but that’s a theoretician’s …”

“I’m against the idea of planning countermeasures on the assumption that this epidemic is influenza,” said Tanabe in a fervent voice. “We’ve got to find the other contagion. The
real
contagion.”