‘Are you okay?’ whispered Alex.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said.
He stared at the TV hanging from a corner of the ceiling and tried to take an interest in a replay of a hockey game. Conscious in a crystalline way of how much knowledge they shared, and how far it estranged them. A hundred dead things stood between them, and not one of them a clear death that could be mourned.
‘Alex?’
His eyes snapped open and he jerked in a quick startle reflex when a hand touched his arm; he thought at first it must be Susie, then saw an intern he recognized standing beside him.
‘Are you on call tonight?’
Susie was sitting on the floor, her head lowered, her hair veiling her face.
‘No, I’m… Look, I’m in my winter coat, do I look on call? I’m here with a friend. Is there… ’
‘Oh geez.’ The intern, Sam, that was his name, frowned nervously. ‘Could you do us a favour, man? We’ve got an assault over there, and… ’
Assault. He rubbed his eyes. Sam was still talking.
‘… some kind of glass bottle, and they said he was talking about an anthrax letter, but the thing is he’s all cut up… ’
‘No. No.’ Alex pulled his coat around himself, though he was sweating from the heat, his shirt wet under the arms and along his back. Thinking of flesh and broken glass, the metal tang of blood, shards in the muscle. ‘No, I can’t do it. You’ll have to page Laura.’
‘Please, man? The police want this on record as quickly as – and we’ve got this reporter hanging around who… ’
‘Go,’ said Susie from the floor. ‘Just go, Alex.’
His chest was half collapsing on itself, his eyes filmy. ‘Sam, call somebody else,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry, but I can’t.’
‘I told you to go,’ said Susie. But then a nurse was kneeling down beside her, touching her shoulder and telling her she could come up to intensive care now. Susie rose, and began to walk, and then the nurse turned around again.
‘Wait. Are you the person who arrived with her?’
Alex nodded, Sam still gesturing to him.
‘You’ll need to come with us as well. The doctor needs to talk to you about infection.’
They rose up in the elevator to a different world, insulated from the crowds below them, and walked down a long low corridor, the sound of their boots hollow in the sudden quiet, into the waiting room. Armchairs and couches upholstered in dark blue fabric, pink and white prints of flowers on the walls. Someone was lying on a couch wrapped in a grey blanket, other people eating takeout sandwiches from plastic plates. The nurse left them standing in the centre of the room, assuring them the doctor would be there soon.
Alex went to a vending machine in the hallway and bought two more cups of coffee, and when he came back he saw that a resident, a tired young woman with unwashed hair, was sitting in one of the soft chairs beside Susie. He started to walk to another corner of the room, but the doctor beckoned him over, and spoke to them about vectors of transmission, how the bacteria rode on the fluids of the mouth and the nose. How, where, people touched each other.
Alex told her about the damp handshake, about wiping Derek’s mouth when he found him in the tent, and the doctor nodded.
‘I don’t think you’re high risk at all, but I’m going to prescribe you a course of Rifampin as a precaution. And…’ she glanced at her file ‘… and Ms Rae? Would you have had any very close type of contact?’
Alex looked at Susie, who was biting down again on her index finger.
‘You shared a bottle of water,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Susie. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Last week.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, that’ll be Rifampin for you as well. We won’t have a definite diagnosis until we get the bacterial cultures, but it’s presenting pretty clearly, and we’re aware of other recent cases, so it’s best to start the prophylaxis right away. Can you tell me – I understand his lifestyle was a bit unusual – but do you know if there’s anyone else who could be at risk?’
Susie shrugged. ‘The street nurses visited him. I doubt he would have let them get very close, but I can give you the number for the group.’
‘I’d appreciate that. Public Health will need this kind of information.’ She looked at her file again. ‘Now, again, this is really something that Public Health will take up, but the particular outbreak we’re experiencing right now seems to have started with a young sex worker. Would your brother,’ she glanced down again, ‘would Derek, to your knowledge, have any reason to be in contact with… that type of activity?’
Susie put her head down on her knees. ‘Low end of the street trade?’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘Probably an addict?’
The doctor cleared her throat.
‘Okay, doesn’t matter. But yeah. I mean, it may not have been sex as we know it. Do you really need to hear the details? Because I can probably tell you, but I’d honestly rather not.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ She took out two small slips of paper, scribbled a few words on each. ‘There’s a pharmacy downstairs where you can get these filled.’ She rubbed her eyes and sighed, a momentary vulnerability she should not have shown them. She’d recognized Alex, maybe, let down her guard in the presence of a coworker. Then she caught herself, straightened her shoulders and left the room.
‘It’s not open, actually,’ said Alex, when she was gone. ‘The pharmacy. I expect she’s forgotten what time it is.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It opens again at seven.’
‘Okay. Whatever,’ said Susie, her head still on her knees. Alex pushed a cup of coffee towards her, and she unfolded herself enough to reach for it.
‘The doctor says he’ll probably live,’ she said, her voice low. ‘He’s still breathing on his own. Not too much cerebral edema.’
‘That’s good, then. You found him in time.’
Susie picked a bit of styrofoam from the edge of the coffee cup. ‘There could be brain damage, of course. Epilepsy. Hearing loss. It’ll be a while before they know.’ She lifted the cup halfway to her mouth and lowered it again. ‘I wanted… ’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Alex, I wanted him to die. I did.’
‘I said it’s okay.’
‘I’m the only one who loves him. And even I wanted him to die.’
He tried to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away, and he was left feeling as if his hand had hit the edge of something broken.
A boy and a girl, once upon a time, among the green lawns of the suburbs. The boy makes a DNA spiral from drinking straws and hangs it over his bed. This is what we are, he says. This is what we have to be.
He draws a picture on his wall and labels it the inevitable heat death of the universe. The girl raises one hand to it and thinks that this, if nothing else, would be a means of escape; but she will find another one, she will do what she has to, she will make herself a way.
I will save you, says the boy, I will always save you, and she knows again that he is wrong. That neither one of them can really be saved.
V
In the centre of the city, several men, unknown to each other, are receiving Rifampin from their doctors; a powerful antibiotic, not commonly prescribed. Each of these men has taken care not to mention it to anyone else, to obscure their thin line of connection, the single young body shared between them all.