By the time we moved in together, Ellen was doing public relations for a big firm. It was totally vapid work, if I am being honest. Why does a bean dip need a PR campaign? (She really did have a client that made bean dip, or frozen nachos—one or the other.) Ellen accused me of belittling her work, which was scary given that I had only verbalized a small fraction of my cynical thoughts. She had little or no interest in my work at the lab and not enough background in science for me to explain why my work mattered. By the time I realized that Ellen did not know the difference between RNA and DNA—and had no interest in learning—it was obvious that we were not meant to be together for the long run. I suspect she was thinking the same, but neither of us had done anything about it. We had a comfortable routine.
The Capellaviridae crisis created new tensions. I was almost never home. The White House obviously forbade us from talking to outsiders about the crisis, so when I was home, I was not able to explain what was happening. I was not even able to say that I had been to the White House for a meeting. “I’m working on something really important,” I told her one night when I came home after midnight.
“I know,” she said sympathetically. “It’s hard when we’re both this busy.”
The bean dip? I thought. You are comparing the public relations strategy for a bean dip to a deadly epidemic? “No, like really important,” I said. That was a mistake, obviously. I will not relate the balance of the conversation. We were done at that point; it was just a question of making it official. I did not have time to move out, but that was where things were clearly headed.
So when the thing happened with Jenna, it was not as bad as a handful of blowhard members of Congress made it out to be.
19.
TIE GUY HAD THREE HUGE COMPUTER MONITORS ON HIS desk. They were arranged like a dashboard, making his small dark office feel like the bridge of a spaceship with him as the captain. The light from the screens reflected off his face. “I’m not seeing anything,” he said. I was standing behind him. There was not room for a second chair in his office.
“We need to pick up the pace on this,” I said. We both knew that was a ridiculously unhelpful thing to say, like telling someone to “think harder.”
“To begin with, the data are complete shit,” Tie Guy said. We both knew that to be true. The public health community—doctors and nurses and hospitals and even coroners—had no reason to believe that Capellaviridae was anything more than a nuisance. By that point we had roughly three hundred deaths that could be linked to Capellaviridae. One big plane crash. Plane crashes happen, I told myself. Besides, those people would have been fine if they had just gone to the doctor. Nearly a thousand people had died in car accidents over the same stretch. Yet I knew there was a problem with these rationalizations. It was not just one plane crash. It was one plane crash with evidence to suggest that hundreds of other planes with the same design flaw might soon start falling out of the sky. It could even be thousands of planes.
And our problem was trickier than planes. With a plane crash, an FAA investigator shows up at the site of the crash, does a preliminary investigation, and says, “You need to ground every plane that might have a defective Y-hinge holding the rear engine in place.” Nobody panics because swapping out the Y-hinges will prevent more planes from falling out of the sky. With Capellaviridae, there was no “Y-hinge.” We had no idea what was happening. Nor was there any obvious behavioral response that would minimize the public risk (like flying less). What does that press conference look like? “Hey, everyone, we just want you to know that you are all at serious risk from a pathogen with the potential to cause a pandemic at a time when our Dormigen stocks are running low. We do not understand why or how this is happening, and there is nothing you can do to avoid it, but we felt you ought to be aware of the situation. We won’t be taking any questions at this time, because we don’t have any answers.” How would that go over?
We had a dilemma: If we did not tell the medical community how serious Capellaviridae might be, they would continue to send us the same lousy, incomplete information. They would not test for Capellaviridae. Or if they did and prescribed Dormigen, they would neglect to enter it into the database. And so on. Our public health detectives would get fewer clues and less cooperation because the public would have no idea that a serial killer was on the loose.
Or, we could do the medical equivalent of announcing that the building was on fire and cause people to run screaming for the exits—only there were not any exits.
“Look at this,” Tie Guy said, pointing at the middle screen on his desk. It was a map of the United States with yellow and green dots scattered across it with no discernible pattern.
“What am I looking at?” I said.
“The yellow dots are deaths, the green dots are cases we know of that have been treated with Dormigen. Do you see anything interesting?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Neither do I. The data are totally worthless. We know almost nothing about these people.”
“What do we know?” I asked.
“The people who are dying tend to be young and healthy. A surprising number of college students. What do you make of that?” Tie Guy asked, the frustration lingering in his voice.
“They were probably just too stubborn to go to the doctor—thought they were invincible,” I answered.
“Could be,” he said. “In that case, we don’t even know who is most at risk, we just know who is too stupid to go to the doctor.”
“We need an estimate,” I said. “How often does this thing turn fatal?”
“I saw the e-mail,” he said angrily. “You know as well as I do that we can’t begin to answer that question with any degree of certainty.”
“This could be an epidemic,” I said.
“Fine,” he snorted. “Run a public service announcement telling people to go to the doctor. Give them Dormigen. Collect real information. Then ask me what is going on.”
“What if we were to run out of Dormigen?” I asked, skating just to the boundary of what I should be saying.
“Then we’re fucked,” he said. “And if North Korea fires a nuke at California, then we’re also fucked. This is not what I get paid to think about.”
“What if we were to sample an MSA?[5] Do it right. Collect all the meaningful info for you to do some real analysis.”
He laughed. “Good luck finding a budget for that.”
“If I can find the money, how long would it take?”
He turned from the monitors to look at me. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got people leaning on me for answers. How long would it take?”
“Well, there’s nothing difficult about the analysis if you get me decent data. A couple of days, maybe.”
I could see it in his eyes: He knew something was up. Maybe he saw it in my eyes. “Set everything else aside,” I said. “This has to be top priority.”