The line of Mullich’s god particle. Not the elegant God Particle, the math of subatomic forces, but the blatant straight line of an architect. On Seven, a fluorescent tube explodes above Enry Dozier as he reaches down from his ladder perch. He collapses over the top step, dies, his shoulders and arms posturing from the pulse that disconnects his brain stem. Within the same second, the same pulse, on fourth floor recovery, Lana Fleming falls across the body of her roommate, dies, her fingers holding a cup of tea, her last breath a dead breath, a residual puff from the spasm in her bronchus. On third floor ICU, Richard Verdasco stares at the ceiling and dies, pretty eyes open, nerve endings just beginning to fizz and break the thinnest of capillaries in the softest organs. In a storage closet on second floor surgery, Marley Peterson holds her last cigarette and dies, the neuropaths throughout her entire body firing.
On the first floor ER—her ER—Albert Cabral crouches near a bed curtain, practicing shadow puppets on the gauzy surface. What does he feel? Is it an emotion? A sudden sadness? A loss of heart?
Of meaning? The butterfly silhouette on the curtain reduced to nothing more than the shadow of his hands?
In the subbasement boiler room, she is Lual Meeks. The fluorescent above the boiler relic explodes, and she is struck through her shoulder and left lung. Her last instinct is to slide into the warm copper palm beneath her.
To Mullich’s microscopic God Particle, surfaces are liquid or gas, the first state of matter irrelevant due to velocity. Cinder block and bone are hollow matrices. Metal, glass, skin, and vessel walls part and collapse, ripple and recompose. Water. She knows there is a fourth state of matter. And a fifth. But she is ER, trauma, molecular, as rough in matter as the architect’s line.
Mendenhall released the button on the laser pen. She backed out of the copper relic, sought distance, looked at the dark panel covering the dead fluorescent and the hard surface of the boiler tank.
A virus is not the thing we see in the electron microscope, hiding in protein folds. That is a virion, a first and necessary cause, a particle that is neither alive nor dead. It is a-life. Other causes and conditions must occur to create the virus. A virus is an event, a collection of actions and reactions between the virions and the involved cells. You do not have a virus. You experience it. You can’t see it; you see its effects. You adjust. You try. You live. You die.
She aimed the laser at the dark half of the fluorescent panel. The red beam sparkled into thousands of pieces as it refracted through the shards of the shattered tube. They lay scattered across the inside of the translucent panel, reminding her of a kaleidoscope.
“I’m no crazier than Thorpe,” she said, firing the stolen laser pen.
She was alone and speaking to the ghost of Lual Meeks.
37.
It had been twelve hours: 0736. Seven thirty-six a.m. on her six-dollar running watch. According to protocol, a meeting had to be ordered. Mendenhall was summoned as the physician who had called containment. She had thought Thorpe would assume this position. She was also summoned as Floor One leader, a position she had thought she had deferred to Dmir, or somebody like him, somebody dressed like him.
The meeting was held in one of the old lecture theaters, a cupped room with stage and podium, used when Mercy had still been a teaching hospital. Years ago, before her time, it had become an informal storage space, its floors and aisles convenient for big equipment and stuffed files, its nooks ready for illicit cigarette breaks.
Someone had prepared the room. The podium stood off center next to a table set up for a panel. An old surgical light cast a serious yellow glow over the stage. The aisles remained dim, a single thin light high above, seemingly unattached in the darkness up there.
Old equipment had been pushed toward the ends and rear, looming, craning, containing. Mullich.
She spotted him in the back row, in a lab coat along with the rest of the audience, laptop glowing blue. In the rest of the scatter—no one sitting side by side, no one in the first two rows—she recognized only Claiborne and a guy from Surgery. On the panel, she recognized only Dmir. The panel chair closest to the podium was empty.
Mendenhall was terrible at meetings, never ready when she was supposed to speak, always speaking when it was best to hunker down and shut up. She climbed past old equipment—a steel X-ray with sharp joints and snagging wires—and took the seat next to Mullich. If not for the blue of his laptop, she would have been invisible.
She returned his laser pen, cuffing it back to him, a passed note.
He raised an eyebrow at the pen, slid it into the pocket of his lab coat. “I think you’re supposed to be down there.” He spoke softly as he nodded toward the stage.
On the panel with Dmir were two other men she did not recognize. One had broad shoulders and did not fit into his lab coat. Some kind of security head. Mendenhall would leave before it was his turn. She eyed her exit path, over and around Mullich, back into the darkness. There would be clanking.
“I figured that chair was for Thorpe,” she whispered. “Where is he?” She scanned the paltry audience, all of them mere silhouettes in front of their laptops and handhelds.
Dmir rose from his panel chair and took the podium. Mendenhall suppressed a groan. She took a granola bar from her coat pocket.
The paper wrapping crackled. Heads turned. She put the bar back in her pocket and slid lower in her chair, imagined herself hidden beneath Mullich’s tall shadow.
Dmir began. “Six demises in twelve hours.”
She whispered to Mullich. “Six deaths in one second.”
The architect straightened. Onstage, Dmir paused and peered into the audience. Mendenhall slid lower.
Dmir cleared his throat and continued, “We have reports of other possibles. From the Boston area and Reykjavik.”
“The hell?” She looked at Mullich.
Dmir paused and peered. Silhouettes moved.
Mullich turned his screen to her. There was a page set up for this meeting. The first line was about Boston and Reykjavik. She looked at all of the other screens, all on the same page. Her name was all over it.
Dmir proceeded. “Dr. Thorpe is speaking with the Centers for Disease Control.”
With DC? With them? Outside? She resisted another whisper.
Mullich was looking at her, the blue light carving the side of his face into angles. Mendenhall’s hands felt empty, the space in front of her gravitational.
She stole the laser pen from Mullich’s pocket. She fired its beam into her cupped palm. Showed him. Six deaths in one second. She aimed the pen toward Dmir. She could put a red dot on his big forehead.
She pulled Mullich’s laptop toward her. “I need to use this.”
She only breathed the words, mouthed them carefully. “Yours. Not mine. Capice?”
Mullich squinted at her. Dmir’s speech became nothing more than a drone, a recap of their cases, a vent sputtering somewhere.
As Dmir went on, she began her research. Mullich did something to his screen, some function she did not understand. The screen changed color, to a kind of dull orange.
Mullich saw everything.
Mendenhall found one site, then another. Mullich reached over to help. Forty thousand tons of cosmic dust falls to Earth every day. Every day. This was the average. She found the most scientific sites, ones full of equations. She eased her eyes on the calculus, felt Mullich doing the same. They saw a photo of three cosmologists from the Kivla Institute crouching over a collection pool, a type of radar dish filled with water, mirroring the sky. They saw microscopic photos of the particles, some globular, some crystalline.