“Joe, for God’s sake, let me in. This is awful!”
His hands were in his pockets. I smiled at his war-orphan look and backed up and he entered. He stood in the hallway, shivering. He had no tolerance for cold. Maybe there was something else in a pocket, not just hands. Maybe he’d pull it out.
“Want some coffee?”
“Anything hot will do!”
I walked at his side to the large, cold kitchen. This room had been old when Khrushchev and Nixon held their kitchen debate in a mock-up U.S. home, at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, in 1959. I opened a metal cabinet and extracted a tin of Folgers. I measured out three heaping tablespoons for the Braun and poured in cold water. We sat at the chipped Formica table and smelled coffee brewing. The mug into which I poured Ranjay’s portion read, “Cleveland Indians” and showed a grinning comic-book Native American, with a red-faced leer. Mine read, “Yakutia! Come to Russia’s Arctic Diamond Week!”
“No new cases for three days,” Ranjay said, cradling the mug. “People are getting angrier. Something will blow.”
“It’s spreading slower than we feared.”
“Maybe not spreading at all, Joe. Like Ebola. It broke out. It killed many. It went underground, disappeared.”
“What about the monkeys that Dr. Morgan injected with rabies?”
“Dead in three days.”
I gasped, stunned. “That’s a huge increase in speed.”
“Huge,” he said morosely.
“But this also means,” I said, brightening a little, “that if there are no new cases in town, maybe it’s not airborne. Wait! Morgan and Cruz would have checked that, put sick monkeys with healthy ones, just like Constantine did with the coyotes in Texas. Any spread?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. They also inoculated sick monkeys, to see if the vaccine works. Any of those animals fall ill?”
“So far, no. So far, the vaccine seems to work. So maybe the spread is point source. But, Joe, it’s only a few days since we started. The vaccine may just slow it down, not stop it. Too early. We need more time. But I don’t know how much time is left before the whole town blows up.”
I sat back. It was too early to relax. He was right. There were no good options.
If it just disappears, if the quarantine lifts, we may never find out what happened. If we stay, we’ll have a riot soon. If we leave, Karen’s killer may get away.
Ranjay looked upset. His hands squeezed the mug. He changed subjects. “Joe, they made you a scapegoat. You are the reason we discovered the rabies. I myself pooh-poohed the notion, yet you were diligent. I do not like what they have done to you. It is not fair at all.”
“Thanks, Ranjay.” I was moved. But I also did not trust him. It was nothing personal. I did not trust anyone except Eddie, and Eddie was elsewhere most of the time.
Ranjay said, “I think that often in life, the man who sees things first is the one that others do not want to know, my friend.”
“I wish I saw things better.”
He drank. I drank. He added more sugar. We watched each other over china rims. He had not unzipped his parka yet. At least both of his hands were visible. I could move a lot faster than Ranjay. If Ranjay made a move for his pocket, I’d beat him, I knew.
“Also,” he said at length, more quietly, “I’ve been round the clock at the hospital and did not have an adequate chance to say how sorry I am about Karen.”
“Thank you.”
“Joe. It is funny, in my country, we arrange marriages. I arranged my own marriage, you know. I was in London. I dated English girls. It did not work. You people believe that if you have a feeling, the logical parts will follow, after you marry. We believe that if the logical parts are there to start with, feeling will follow. But in your case, I would say that everything was there all along.”
“Very eloquent, Ranjay.”
“What have you found out?”
“Excuse me?”
Ranjay’s eyes dipped toward his mug, and he lifted it, so I could not see his face. He said, lowering it, “You are a clever person. You would not have made only one copy of her files. You are asking everyone many questions. You are looking at other copies, aren’t you? You’ve not given up.”
I considered, my heartbeat rising. “Yes.”
“Find anything?” His brows were up.
“Like what?”
“Some clue. Some reason why they had the accidents.”
“I think I found a thread,” I lied.
We were interrupted by more knocking. Ranjay rose as I did, casually drifted beside me down the long hall. A bulb was out. The remaining glowing sixty watt, hanging from a loop-wire, seemed ready to expire. There were no windows in the hall. The knocking grew louder. I reached out, punched the code, opened the door.
“Hi, Bruce.”
Now I had two visitors. As we all went back into the kitchen, it struck me that although I’d seen Ranjay’s Honda outside, Bruce’s late-model Subaru Outback was not in sight. It was probably around the side of the house.
“This place is a shithole,” Bruce said, looking around. “An igloo would be better than this.”
“I don’t mind. Want coffee?”
Bruce removed his gloves, rubbing his powerful hands. “Arthritis,” he said. “Coffee, yeah.”
Bruce sat on my left, hat off, jacket on, but inside the polar spa, wearing extra layers made sense. Ranjay regained his seat, on the right. I couldn’t see them both at the same time but I relaxed a little bit. With two people here, one wouldn’t try something, I figured.
Bruce told Ranjay, “I heard there’s no more vaccine coming.”
“We’ve used all supply in the U.S. We’re trying to get more from Mexico.”
“I heard you’ve got frostbite cases.”
“Three Rangers didn’t cover up their faces enough. We warned them. I gave a lecture to them when they got here. They didn’t listen.”
Bruce told a story about his first winter in Barrow, about going out into a garage and picking up an ice ax without gloves on. The next day, his fingers turned blue. The blue crept up his forearms, in his veins. It was poisoning. Frostbite. It had come because he touched metal. Just touching metal had almost killed him. “But antibiotics did the trick,” he said.
Then he asked Ranjay, “How long before Homza — if there are no more cases — before he bags the quarantine?”
“I do not know,” Ranjay said.
Bruce and Ranjay made eye contact. A silent message seemed to pass between them. Ranjay rose abruptly and said he had to go to the bathroom. Bruce said, jokingly, “Don’t let it hang out too long in there, or it’ll freeze, man.”
After Ranjay left, Bruce pulled his chair closer and said, sympathetically, “You’re a quarantine in a quarantine, Joe. I can’t believe Homza kicked you off the base. That they even think you might be responsible.”
“Thanks.”
“What are you going to do when they lift the quarantine, if they lift it? I mean, no new cases in three days. It can’t go on forever?”
I answered truthfully. “I haven’t thought about it.” I had no vision of a future, just Karen, these walls, the pistol snug against my back, the laptop.
“You could work with us,” Bruce suggested. “We have bear people in Canada, at Resolute Bay, and in Norway in Svalbard. Helping the planet, Joe. Sounds corny, but it’s not bad work. It gives a feeling of accomplishment. When my divorce went through, I felt a void, and those animals helped fill it. You could do worse than that.”