The woman switches her pleading to a different language: Arabic, maybe, but Mei can’t say for sure.
The activity attracts the helicopters. They circle tight and low.
The man is wandering now between the two sets of barricades, as if lost in an empty moat. He looks dizzy. He is beginning to cry.
On the other side of the barricades, the woods loom, and the mountains—twenty square miles of state forest stretch out on both sides of this road.
He keeps going, this man. He begins to climb the second set of barricades.
“Stop where you are,” say the soldiers, but he does not stop.
The reflective yellow lines of the road are sparkling in the sun beneath the man’s shoes. He climbs up over the second set of barricades.
The soldiers half catch him and they half don’t, and Mei can see, as the man lands hard on the asphalt, that these soldiers are afraid to touch him.
They are pointing their guns at him.
“Don’t hurt him!” shouts the woman. She is wearing a green silk scarf at her neck, beige pants, gold earrings. A boy, maybe eleven or twelve, stands by her side. “Please,” she calls to the soldiers. “He’s not acting like himself. He’s a professor.”
The man keeps coming toward the soldiers.
“I need to leave here!” he shouts. “You have to let us go.”
“Sir,” they say, “please.” And then more gently: “Go home.”
“I am five thousand miles from home,” he screams. “I have fled my home. And now you treat us no better than where we came from.”
The woman is shouting. She is crying as she pleads with the soldiers.
Certain experts will later suspect that the virus affects the brain in subtle ways even before the onset of sleep. The waking consciousness, in some cases, takes on certain qualities of the dream state. Heightened activity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. Decreased activity in the cerebral cortex, charged with reasoning. Increased impulsiveness. Some will say later that these effects may have contributed to what happened on this day.
The soldiers are backing away from the man, but he keeps going and going, as if the way to make them understand is to shout the words up close to their faces, as if, by grabbing hold of that one’s uniform, he will finally make himself clear.
The crack of the shot comes crisp and cold. That sound—it sucks all the other noise from the world. The man goes right down.
Mei’s hand darts down for Matthew’s hand, but already he is moving forward. He is surging toward the barricades.
“Shit,” says the soldier who shot the gun. “Shit, shit, shit. I told him,” he keeps saying. “I told him to keep away. Didn’t I tell him?”
The other soldier is crouching over the man. He is calling for help on his radio. Cell phone videos will capture three people from the crowd, Matthew among them, jumping the two sets of barricades to help, and also the woman, who will turn out to be the man’s wife, and the boy, his son, climbing the barricades to get to the man, the boy ignoring his mother’s pleas. She is sobbing, speaking to her son in a language only the two of them, in this crowd, understand.
From where she is standing, Mei cannot see the man’s face, but she can see the shine of his blood on the asphalt. Something is happening in Mei’s chest. She can’t take a deep breath.
Into this moment comes a small rumbling at high altitude. An airplane is cutting across the sky, the events on this road too small to see from those windows, as if the passengers up there and the people down here are operating on two different scales of experience.
What a relief it is—and a horror—when the man begins to scream.
He is soon taken away by an ambulance. His wife and his boy go with him. Mei has a feeling that something more needs to be done for them, but they’re gone—there’s no way to help them now.
Matthew is talking to one of the other men who tried to help, one of the group of stranded business travelers.
“Our hotel was evacuated in the middle of the night,” he says. “That was two days ago. We spent last night on the floor of the bus station.”
“We have nowhere to go,” says the woman without shoes. She is carrying a pair of heels in her hand.
“How many of you are there?” Matthew asks. A stab of fear comes into Mei. She knows what he’ll say next.
Ten, they say. No, nine, someone corrects.
“You can stay with us,” says Matthew.
“What if they’re sick?” Mei whispers.
Matthew’s face stays hard and straight, unreadable.
“What if you are?” he says.
She can hear her mother begging her not to take any risks. They think it was in the hotel ventilation system—that’s what they’ve said. They have probably all been exposed.
They are sales reps, these people, whose suitcases now fill the living room while they take turns in the showers, in the master and the guest, and in the little girl’s bathroom, too. Mei thinks of it too late—how maybe just rinsing their bodies there will contaminate the girl’s bath toys, her tiny boats, those letters made of foam. A wild panic beats in her chest. She must remind herself that little Rose is far away, for now, floating on a cruise ship with her parents.
At first, they sit around watching the footage of the shooting on television.
“You can’t say they didn’t warn him,” says one of the guys, in a red polo shirt, a company logo embroidered on the pocket.
Matthew is shaking his head. He is pacing around.
“I’m just saying,” the man says. “They wouldn’t have shot him if he listened.”
“Did you know,” says Matthew, “that in 1930, in Hawaii, the government quarantined a Chinese neighborhood and then set the whole place on fire?”
“Is that true?” says one of the women. She is wearing two sweatshirts, but she is holding her arms like she’s cold.
“Let’s talk about something else,” says the guy in the polo shirt.
The house has plenty of wine, and Matthew keeps opening up bottles. Everyone is eager to drink. Just the taste in Mei’s mouth makes her feel better, even before it hits her blood.
Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore that this big house belongs to someone else, as if this patch of wooded earth has been cut loose from the rest of the world, and from all its rules of cause and consequence.
They drift out onto the back porch, and Mei can see the woman next door watching them there. She might call the owners, this woman. But Mei surprises herself: she does not care.
After a while, one of the women asks Mei and Matthew how they met. “I always like to hear how couples get together,” she says.
A sudden awkwardness surges between them—isn’t that the one feeling that, when shared, widens the gap between two people instead of closing it?
“We’re not a couple,” says Matthew, as if it’s a crazy thing to say.
Mei can feel her face turning hot.
“Oh,” says the woman.
In the quiet that follows, moths buzz and flutter against the lights. A Humvee rumbles by. Matthew goes in for more wine, and then appears on the porch with the autographed guitar back in his arms again.
One of the sales reps begins to smoke.
Maybe, in a photograph, it would look like a small party on a back porch, the long light, the late fall, a kid playing guitar in one corner.
There is not much food left in the Sub-Zero, and all the stores, they’ve heard, are closed.
“I know where we can find something,” says Matthew. There’s a jolt of excitement in his words, the crackle of a boy accepting a dare.
The porch swing sways in his wake as he stands and then hops over the wooden railing. He lands beside a row of trash cans—the lids come right off in his hands.