Outside, it was night, and he swayed as he left the building, needed to grasp the handrail by the steel steps, barely aware of the frigid metal against his hand. Cars were passing, their headlights brighter than usual, painful, in his face, causing him to turn away. His throat hurt badly. He bent over and threw up in the snow. When the episode was over he realized that his saliva still ran freely from his mouth over his chin, dripping, Christ.
Finally, he was scared. This was no small cold. This was no flu. Cancer?
George walked into the middle of the street to hail a ride. A cab passed but did not stop. The driver already had a passenger. In Barrow, you didn’t flag cabs. They were on radio call or you found them outside the AV Value Center, where they picked up shoppers. But gasoline cost so much — as much as seven dollars a gallon — that no taxi driver would simply drive around, hoping for fares.
Another pair of headlights approached. Fearing that if he waited longer, he’d lose mobility again, George stumbled into the road and held up his arms. The Subaru began skidding. It loomed and swayed but stopped. The driver was a scientist he recognized; Bruce Friday, who regularly came to Wainright to research polar bears.
“What’s wrong, George?”
“I need to get to the hospital.”
Dr. Friday helped him in and he coughed on the man, sprayed his whole face, mumbled, “Sorry.” Dr. Friday said not to worry and wiped the spit off with his parka sleeve. Back at the wheel, he eased down on the accelerator to keep from skidding. The hospital, like any building in Barrow, was minutes away.
When they pulled up at the ER George’s hand refused to grasp the door handle. Dr. Friday came around to his side and helped him out. George, staring at Friday’s gloved hand, had an urge to bite it. He started laughing. Friday asked him if he was able to walk, and slipped an arm under his shoulders. Someone must have changed the lighting in the ER, because it was like floodlights in a theater, like one time when he’d walked on stage at the University of Alaska auditorium in Anchorage, to receive an award for mentoring the wrestling team. The light hurt.
At first they made him wait, but when he started throwing up they ushered him into a curtained-off cubicle. The nurses took his blood pressure and blood and a young doctor — she looked fifteen years old — asked about symptoms.
He tried to get it out. The curtain seemed to be billowing and voices in the big exam room, from other cubicles, seemed to echo and then the beating sound in his head was like the end of a kivgiq, the winter messenger feast, when all the dance groups in the borough crowd into the high school gym, when, at 2 A.M., after the five-day-long celebration, all the drummers from all the villages marched in, in groups, and stand in a solid line, in their traditional dance clothes, and hit those whale liver — lining and hide handheld drums at the same time. The dancers stamping. The stands filled and everyone — young and old — visitors from D.C., moms with infants on their backs, whalers, and hunters… all clapping… magnificent!
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!
Like a thousand years of drums mixing together under the basketball banners. He blinked. He was hallucinating. He thought he was in that gym, the stands filled, the dancers stomping. BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!
Then his vision changed and there was a new doctor there, that Indian fellow, from Mumbai, positioning a mirror to look into George’s throat but the light spiked so harshly that George reached and swept the mirror into the corner, where it shattered.
“Turn down the lights!” he screamed.
Faces went out of focus. There were more faces there, the two Marine doctors who had flown into Wainright earlier in the season, with the Coast Guard. All three doctors bending over him, looking down at him, looking worried, asking questions that he struggled to answer.
Suddenly he was convulsing, thrashing, trying to hit the doctors, flailing, and when a nurse tried to put the plastic cuffs on him, restrain him against the bed rests, he lunged with his teeth, tried to bite her, felt the crazy heat spread through his synapses, like poison, like a sizzling electricity cauterizing thought, the sun was in his chest, a furnace, consuming tissue as fuel.
Nurses wheeling in medicines.
“George, look at me. George!”
“What’s happening to him, Ranjay?”
“Oh, my God! Look at the monitor!”
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOOOOOOM!..
I stood with Eddie and Ranjay, beside the dead man. His agitation had exploded in the final moments, and he’d been trying to speak, but no words had come out.
“It’s the same thing the Harmons had,” said Eddie.
“It’s in town,” said Ranjay.
“Did we bring it back with us, in the chopper?”
“If we brought it back, why did he get it? Why not us?”
“You think it started here?”
We heard voices from other ER cubicles, as doctors had normal conversations with patients. Where does it hurt? We’re going to do an X-ray. Take these pills when you get home. Illness, but something familiar. Disease, but something we understand.
“What the hell is this thing?” said Eddie.
All three of us doctors, in our imaginations, now filled in sights to go with the voice recordings that Kelley Harmon had made, out in a deserted research camp. And what I imagined was terrifying. Clay Qaqulik holding a shotgun… yes, we’d known that… but all four people convulsing, babbling, and feverish.
Dr. Ranjay Sengupta said, in a whisper, “Contagious?”
I left the cubicle and walked to the ER window. Outside it was night and I looked over the rooftops. I saw headlights moving. I saw lights in windows. In those homes people were watching television and making love and sleeping. I wondered if, in those houses, there was also something else, lurking, small enough to seem invisible. Or was it in the caskets awaiting flight out? I looked at the ER doors, portals for the sick and injured. At the moment they were still, as was the hallway. I did not want to think about what I saw in my mind’s eye, which was more people coming in, convulsing, screaming, like George.
Eddie said, “We go home tomorrow, One.”
“Oh, not now, Two.”
I went back into the cubicle. The man on the table looked yellow in the artificial light, and the pain he’d suffered at the end remained etched in agony lines of his mouth. My eyes swept the cubicle, the medicine vials, the tools of my job, all of which had failed us this evening.
I saw the mirror shards on the bright linoleum, in the corner, I recalled George sweeping the instrument from Ranjay’s hand, barking something about too-bright light.
Mirrors…
And then it hit me.
“Shit.”
The other two doctors stared at me, understanding that I’d made a connection. But it was a bad one, a very, very hideous connection, a connection that I wished would turn out to be wrong.
“We knew it. But we ignored it,” I said.
They both drew in closer.
“We ignored it because we said it was impossible,” I said. “Tell me, why did we come here this summer, Eddie?”
“To check if there have been changes, new things…”
“Changes, Eddie. Because the place is warming. Because the Slope’s been a dumping ground. Because new species are arriving. We saw it, but didn’t believe it.”