He shut his eyes and tried to grip these memories, but each one became subsumed by the image and weight of a dark ocean boiling. Eventually, there was a knock on the lab door.
He dealt with an FBI agent named Chen, who could not have been more out of central casting. Neat, combed hair, workaday suit over a muscular build, pen, pad, and latex gloves. He was so no-nonsense that after the biohazard unit had put police tape across the door and collected the powder, Tony felt a simmering panic at the man’s calm.
“Should I go to the hospital?”
The agent’s eyes flitted up and back down to a notepad where his hand moved furiously.
“Do you feel any of the symptoms we talked about?”
“No. I mean, my throat tickles a little but it kind of did this morning.”
“Anthrax poisoning tends to produce a little more than a throat tickle. You said you have a change of clothes—put those on, give us yours. Go home, shower, and if you start to feel real symptoms, go to the hospital. I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as the lab looks at this.”
The farther away Tony got from the office and the envelope the less plausible the threat felt. By the time he got home and told Gail, he was behaving as though it was nothing more than the stupidest of pranks, with the entire floor of Nierenberg having to evacuate when the FBI unit descended.
Gail spent a minute staring at him in uncomprehending horror, a minute hurling profanities at him for not going to the hospital immediately, and then several more reading the anthrax Wikipedia page.
“So we’re assuming you haven’t been poisoned? That’s the assumption we’re all operating under?” Her eyes still as wide as when he first told the story.
“The FBI seemed to think it wasn’t worth worrying about unless I felt ill.”
Gail squirted air through the small gap in her top front teeth, a very Gail tell for a snarky comment forthcoming. “I really hope whoever this guy is, he understands the dramatic irony of being scientifically literate enough to use science to make an antiscience terrorist attack.”
“They really didn’t seem to think it was necessary, I swear. If they thought there was a reason to worry I’d be there right now.”
“Fine,” she said, embracing him and tucking her head underneath his chin so that her ear aligned with his heart. “But, Tone, if you die, where am I ever going to find another nerdy white grouch with no meaningful social skills?”
The next day Agent Chen called Tony to tell him he was in the clear. The powder had been cornmeal.
“Cornmeal,” Tony repeated. “To what goddamn end?”
“No cheaper way to put a scare into someone. It’s why we tend not to break out Seal Team Six every time someone gets the idea.” Chen had a conversational presence like he was reading out of a phone book. “We’re still going to try to trace this letter. A powder threat—even if it’s a hoax—is still a felony.”
But they never found the guy who mailed cornmeal and the letter with its big block font. Tony never received another such threat, though when he and Niko secured a grant to finish their work and published their findings a year later, the emails did start to trickle in. These were less death threats and more hateful accusations and childish name-calling. He learned to ignore them. Gail took to calling Tony “Anthrax” every now and again, but she mostly employed the nickname after the speaking offers began to roll in. The story of the letter became a party anecdote.
“I like the way it makes you sound,” she once explained when he asked why she made him tell it. “Brave and fearless.” She cupped his aging butt and winked.
“Why?” he said, smiling. “All I did was shit my pants and call the FBI.”
The story disappeared into the archive of memories that lose all urgency. Except that wasn’t quite right. What he never could have predicted was the part of that experience that did stick with him. That of the image that overwhelmed him as he sat in Niko’s chair waiting for the cavalry. It washed him away for a moment. The walls of the lab had not closed in like a tomb but rather expanded and deepened to almost infinite space and depth. Down there in the vivid blue darkness, in the cold, crushing rapture of the pressure, there was imperceptible warmth. The mounds of dirty yellow ice—the color of urine on snow—were leaking. Other clumps of the whitest frozen latticework, opaque crystals, fizzed like Alka-Seltzer. Or belching up from cracks in the rock, little farts in the dark, that sent schools of pebble-sized bubbles ascending. Or gurgling from invisible pores in the sediment of the ocean floor, beading up, clinging momentarily, and then writhing free of a soft sand carpet. Zipping back and forth, they climbed through frigid water. A mad poetry scrawled in the unseen corners of the oceans’ expanse.
In the years that would follow, this image would settle upon him in moments of his most pressing fear. When Gail came home and told him her doctor had found a metastatic lump in her breast at her improbably young age. When they’d found out that it had already spread to her bones, her spine, her brain, that this wasn’t the kind of breast cancer where you got to traipse around with a pink ribbon for a few years. This was the kind that took you. And when it took her, so rapidly and without mercy or time to come to grips or even fucking think, sitting at her bedside as she slipped away, he felt it.
He felt it after the funeral when he told Older One that he’d probably need help cooking dinner for a while, and she’d whispered that this was kind of gender essentialist without understanding how violently this would crack open his heart. And he felt it then again, years later, when a teenage Khaleesi got into a car accident, and the idiot father of the idiot boy she’d been with couldn’t remember the name of the hospital they’d been taken to. He felt it when he saw the Mother of Dragons in a hospital bed with her arm in a sling, dried blood in her kinky red-brown hair, and a couple of nasty black eyes that would set her accelerating beauty back for a few months. He felt it when he went to her, and she said his name the way she had as a child. Like he could protect her from anything.
He’d feel that same eclipsing terror, born on the day of the letter, in the same familiar way, and all he could see were the bubbles, and then beyond into the molecule itself. This invaluable atomic combination in a prison of ice, struggling its eternal life away in a tomb until it broke free and began its journey through the depths and on to the invisible wastes at the crown of the world.
S
HANE AND
M
URDOCK
G
ET
B
REAKFAST
2014
Shane watched Murdock shred three sugar packets open and dump them in his coffee. Bob Evans made her think of a barn as conceived by a dying old woman doped out of her mind on laudanum. Woven baskets tacked to the wall over a three-dollar painting of a rustic countryside. The other patrons were geriatric with flesh the texture of the snow slurry outside. They ate tediously, automatically, knives struggling through country fried steak, forks impaling scrambled eggs or scooping home fries. She counted four oxygen tanks in the main dining room, one of them hooked to a man so obese that the sides of his butt drooped over the edge of the chair. She watched him eat a small potpie in methodical, dignified bites.
The waitress had come by twice, once for the coffee order and again to deliver the brew. Shane told her they’d wait to get breakfast. Now they were sipping the not-terrible roast and talking about movies.
“That was some garbage. Military hates that movie. Specially EODs,” said Murdock.
“I don’t know, man. I felt like I needed a defibrillator by the time I walked out of the theater.” She blew at the steam rising from the mug.