Sheep Meadow was filling with people. Already seven thousand early arrivals for the 7 P.M. start claimed lawn space with blankets or planted flags, or flew colorful balloons so their friends could find them in the crowd. They opened wines and champagnes, unwrapped cheese, put out grapes and breads and hummus and cold cuts, their Zabar’s picnic baskets filled with food.
Expected crowd tonight: twenty-three thousand. This was New York at its finest, where the high and low mixed; the superrich, from townhouses off 5th Avenue, and illegal immigrants; kids from Harlem beside kids from Park Avenue; Wall Street titans and Bowery vendors; whole extended families; parents and kids, cousins and grandparents, five blankets to a party. Here to eat. Talk. Listen. Lie out on a hot night.
She wobbled along on air currents formed by heat rising off baked pavement and breezes off the rivers. Her compound eyes were covered with tiny lenses called ommatidia, which could pick up the slightest movement. The eyes, atop the head, were photosensitive and could detect changes in light so minor that if a hand came swatting toward her, she’d flee. She took in oxygen through slits in her abdomen. Her antennae, long and feathery, contained receptors capable of locating a human breath, a single plume of carbon dioxide, 110 feet away. She was a hunter who tracked sweat, perfume, or cologne, and she approached her victims using two sets of wings, large ones for buoyancy, and mini-wings for direction, giving her a busy appearance, four wings moving at different speeds.
Her saliva contained an anticoagulant, to keep blood flowing in victims, and natural painkiller, to keep victims from realizing she’d just poked a serrated needle, called a proboscis, into their skin.
She would keep feeding, going from victim to victim, until her abdomen was full.
Below, a record crowd poured into the park from 5th Avenue on the East Side, Central Park West on the other, coming out of the subways, getting off busses. Beneath a rising quarter moon, as the violins warmed up, she dropped and landed on an arm, sensed a slap coming, rose away, circled, returned. Blood flowed into her as an infectious protozoan swam out, and into the dangling arm.
A woman’s voice nearby said, “You’ve lost contact with Joe and Eddie, in Brazil?”
A man protested, “I’m doing the best I can, Chris.”
The arm jerked violently. Dislodged, she flew off, and, still hungry, landed on another person’s ankle.
Hundreds of people were being bitten as the stirring notes of the 1812 Overture began to play. Candles glowed. The moon rose higher. The night was perfect, or so the audience believed.
The encore—An American in Paris—ended at 10 p.m. The music had been sublime, the orchestra playing at a level that exceeded even their normal five-star skills. The temperature had been hot but not oppressive. The park smelled of trees and grass. The traffic on normally busy 5th Avenue had even cooperated, fewer horns sounding, and the passing busses had been quiet hybrids, not the old diesel models. The crowd oozed from the park in ten directions, hailing cabs, getting on subways, strolling along the East Side’s tree-lined streets.
Among the randomly infected were a Deputy Mayor, a fifth grader from a Chelsea day school, a pregnant thirty-year-old from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had driven in with her husband to meet old college friends. A knee replacement specialist from the hospital for special surgery had been bitten. So had a former high school football star and OxyContin addict who’d fallen asleep before intermission, the CEO of a Paris-based perfume company, the Congresswoman who had introduced the orchestra to the audience, and an Albanian doorman from the Bronx.
Honey, you have bites all over the back of your neck!
Back home, a few of the bitten smeared on soothing calamine lotion.
Those little buggers seem to like your cologne, Ed.
It would take a day or two before the fevers hit, and joint pain, the squeezing in the intestines, then the sudden convulsions, the black urine, and the quick deaths.
It was just a few mosquitoes, honey. Stop complaining. Don’t be a baby. The itching will stop.
NINE
The double-deck ferry rode so low that only four inches separated the gunwale from the Madeira. Like other passengers, Rooster and I strung hammocks from hooks in the ceiling for the open-air trip. Every foot of deck seemed crammed with families, chickens, crates, and hammocks. The once-a-week boat, Rooster said, stopped at jungle landings, rubber-tapper outposts, and fazendas, remote cattle ranches. The schedule had us arriving in New Extrema at dawn, eight hours from now, but we were already late.
And now I had a bad feeling that I had just been recognized. A heavyset ferry crewman stared at me from across the deck, and turned away quickly when he realized I looked back. He sped up the stairs from the lower deck to the pilot house. This river boat trip was turning out to be the slowest rescue mission in history. A gamble that Eddie would even be on the other end, still alive.
“It was smart not to go back to the hotel, Joe,” said Rooster, from his hammock.
“No roads lead to New Extrema, Joe. No airplane strip.”
The sand flies were out, biting. Some would carry leishmaniasis. The mosquitoes had subsided slightly after the sun went down. The pilot steered by floodlight, sweeping it in an arc, then shutting it off for some nutty reason, chugging us into a dark so thick that we seemed to be floating. On. I saw something big and alive churning up brown/yellow water off port. Off. On. I saw silhouetted trees crowding both banks and the pink dainty hands of a sloth in top branches, where the creature blinked back.
“Joe, if we would have hired an outboard, it would be faster, but we might have put ourselves in the hands of the same men who take the sick miners. Bad idea.”
No help was coming from Washington. I’d called Ray by sat phone to beg for any aid at all; satellite shots of New Extrema, pressure put on local authorities, FBI files on drug smuggling or terrorist connections in western Brazil.
“Ray, you asked us to look for a training camp. This might be it,” I said.
“No, I asked you to pay attention to potential terrorists. Not to missing gold miners. I’m very sorry about Eddie. I really am. But I have a meeting now.”
If it had not been for the Indian, Cizinio, last night, we might not have even gotten this far. We’d avoided Anasasio and the police when Cizinio paddled us off in a dugout. Then I’d kept my promise to him, forced my worry for Eddie from my mind, gone with Cizinio and Rooster to the public hospital, a humid, ill lit but surprisingly clean place. Visiting hours were over but the nurses admitted a foreign doctor. Nine-year-old Abilio Karitiana — Cizinio’s son — lay twisted like a polio victim with eight other pain-racked children in an isolated ward, coughing up bloody sputum, vomiting, legs twisted with pain. A crazy combo of symptoms: chests filled with fluid, like pneumonia; intestines racked with spasms, like food poisoning; dark urine hinting at kidney failure; hearts galloping at dangerous rates.
One boy had died an hour before, the night doctor, a young guy named Bracamonte, had told me.
“How are you treating them?” I asked.
“The penicillin isn’t working. It may be a bad batch. Sometimes we get counterfeit drugs. Which is why we ask patients for money, to buy the real thing.” Dr. Bracamonte sighed. “I spend half my salary on medicines. The patients think we keep the money for ourselves.”
I judged him honest. He showed a familiar helplessness that I’d seen in dedicated professionals elsewhere in the poorer world, men and women hampered by bad bureaucracy or lack of supplies. Wilderness medicine meant assisting doctors saddled with out-of-date instruments, expired pills, busted X-ray machines. Rooster kept translating as I interviewed Abilio. The boy was underweight and shivered with fever and gripped his father’s hand as though if he let go, he would die.