I decided to walk home, in part to clear my head. Jenna offered to walk with me. I demurred, in part to avoid having to explain: (1) to Ellen, why I had invited a coworker up to our apartment; and (2) to Jenna, why I could not invite her inside for a drink of water after she had walked twenty blocks with me.
63.
I WALKED ALONE, MY MIND STILL IN A FOG. BY THE TIME I reached home, the sun had gone down and my neighbors were returning from work. I said hello to the older woman who lived in the unit above us; I could never remember her name, but I did recall that she did something for United Airlines. As I exchanged small talk with her, it dawned on me that I had left the apartment that morning without my keys. I buzzed my own apartment, hoping Ellen was home, while also kind of hoping she was not.
Ellen buzzed me up. When I got to the door of our apartment, she was standing in the doorway waiting for me. “Oh, my goodness, how are you doing?” she asked. This was the first time we had spoken since I had run out of the apartment before dawn with no explanation. Once the news of the Outbreak became public, the late nights and cryptic comments over the previous days finally made sense to her.
“I’m okay,” I said unconvincingly.
“What’s going to happen?”
“I have no idea,” I said with much more conviction.
“Did you see the news about Cecelia Dodds?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“I did a term paper on her in high school,” she offered.
“You and a lot of other people,” I said.
“It’s horrible.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want something to eat?” she asked.
“I just need to think.” I turned on the television and was surprised to see that the Outbreak was not the top story on Headline News. The President was still flying westward, so there was nothing new to report there. Two things had happened that afternoon to distract attention, if only for a few hours, from Capellaviridae. First, the country music star Tigue McBride (remarkably, the name he was born with) died in a fiery car crash somewhere in West Texas. I am no country music fan, but even I knew that Tigue McBride was a known “bad boy” with a history of substance abuse and broken relationships. He ran his pickup truck into a tree with a seventeen-year-old girl (unnamed because she was a minor) in the front seat. Tigue (thirty-eight years old and married to the B-actress Rhyme Marr—not her born name) was killed on impact; the unnamed minor was in critical condition. Country music fans were scandalized and devastated; everyone else saw the irony in the fact that McBride had died in circumstances that sounded like one of his songs. The news was full of speculation about whether McBride was drunk (yes, it would turn out) and why he was driving on the back roads of Texas with a seventeen-year-old girl who was not his daughter (still not clear).
The second story sucking up airtime was a bizarre kidnapping in Germany. An aggrieved scientist with some serious mental health issues had stormed the podium at a political rally near Munich. Before anyone knew what was happening, the guy jumped up onstage with what looked like a small syringe. There was video of all this, which explained part of the appeal of the story. The crazed scientist, who had been fired from his university post some years before, had a long white beard and frantic eyes. As the startled crowd looked on, the scientist poked the speaker, the CEO of a major agribusiness company, with the small syringe, jamming the pointed end through the man’s suit into his upper arm. The CEO looked more perplexed than pained after he had been poked in the arm. There was no shooting or gore. Local police stormed on the stage and the wild professor left willingly with them.
That, however, was when the story took a turn for the bizarre, as all the news channels were reporting. Once in custody, the scientist explained that he had injected the CEO with a slow-acting toxin of some sort for which only he would be able to provide the antidote. The mad scientist reportedly sat calmly in the police station, explaining to officers that if they wanted the CEO to live, they would have to honor his demands. The former professor had been in the chemistry department at a university in Berlin; there was no doubt that he had the expertise to concoct some fatal formula. Experts had no idea what it might be, however. The scientist intimated that he had used some combination of snake venoms. The CEO was rushed to a hospital, where he developed nausea and a mild fever. Needless to say, he was frantically urging authorities to do whatever it would take to procure the antidote.
The scientist, sitting in the police station, made what he said would be the first of several demands: He wanted an ice-cream cone—a strawberry ice-cream cone, to be more precise. And he wanted to walk freely with police officers to get it. He did not want them to bring his ice-cream cone to the station, and he did not want to walk to the ice-cream parlor in handcuffs. This demand set off a wave of protest and debate in the law enforcement community, not just in Germany but around the world. Germany had a strict policy against publicly negotiating with terrorists; the mad professor’s act had been declared terrorism, mostly for the lack of a more appropriate description of his bizarre behavior. Would it violate Germany’s policy to give the guy his strawberry ice cream? German police officers argued that giving their suspect ice cream was not radically different than giving a suspect a cup of coffee or a cigarette to encourage cooperation.
Right-wing pundits everywhere argued that acceding to the ice-cream demand would encourage the “terrorist” to make more outrageous demands. This prompted the FBI Director’s now-famous retort, “If we give him an ice-cream cone now, we can always say no if he asks for the release of one hundred Hamas prisoners in the future.” There was a robust debate in the media over whether torture would be appropriate in this kind of situation—the poison equivalent of the “ticking bomb” that U.S. presidential candidates are always asked about—but Germany forbade torture under any circumstances, so as a practical matter this was a nonstarter. Meanwhile, the CEO, growing more ill by the minute, was apoplectic that he might expire for lack of a strawberry ice-cream cone.
The story was packaged beautifully for global attention: the mad scientist perpetrator; the privileged CEO victim, waiting anxiously for the antidote; the bizarre ice-cream cone request. The situation grew weirder still when authorities realized that strawberries were not yet in season and none of the ice-cream shops in the neighborhood had strawberry ice cream. When informed of this snafu, the scientist apologized for being difficult and said that chocolate almond would be fine. CNN’s Jake Tapper would later say this was the single most bizarre news development he had ever reported on air. Camera crews followed the scientist and police as they strolled several blocks to a small ice-cream shop, where a terribly nervous young girl with bad skin stood behind the counter. (All of the customers had been cleared out.) The police commissioner asked her for a scoop of chocolate almond ice cream.
“Might I have two scoops?” the scientist interjected.
“Of course,” the police commissioner replied. (Even this decision would be debated later, with one semi-hinged Fox pundit declaring that it validated his assertion that giving in to the ice-cream request would lead to escalating demands.) The poor young ice-cream clerk stood there paralyzed. The police commissioner said more emphatically, “Two scoops of chocolate almond, please.”