Brisling stood in the hospital lobby across from the elevator doors, watching as finger after finger tapped the call button, even though it was already illuminated. How many fingers touched the same button each day? How many microbes did each finger deposit? How many did it withdraw? And how often was the damn button cleaned? Not very, according to the tapestry of fingerprints covering the steel doors.
When Brisling's turn came, he pressed the call button with his elbow. The doors opened, and he stepped inside. Like most humans, he harbored certain apprehensions about the elevator's mechanism, primal fears rooted in the brain stemâthe fear of falling, fear of suffocation, and, as the door closed, fear of getting one's paw stuck in a trap. But as the elevator climbed toward the fourteenth floor, a new fear gripped Brisling's mind, high in the cerebral cortex, a cold fear, dark and terrible. A man-made fear.
Brisling was greeted by a woman wearing a tie-dyed lab coat. She was pale, maybe fifty, with those soft and pretty facial features that accompanied some women's heaviness. She called herself Barbara, and she was the head lab technician for a scientist Brisling had never met, Rachel Shapiro, MD, PhD, whose lab now occupied the space where Carl Lundquist worked in 1992.
The Shapiro lab was modern, sleek, and odorless, not even a whiff of phenol. Big windows overlooked the city to the east. In the distance, Mount Hood glowed grayish-pink through the dirty haze of late afternoon.
Barbara joined Brisling at the window. "Dr. Shapiro told me to give you whatever you needed. Are you two collaborating on something?"
"No." He turned to face her, his hand brushing against the leaves of a potted plant growing on the windowsill, one of many.
"Ach," said Barbara, leaning over to gather up the tiny white flowers littering the sillâdandruff from a strange plant with dark green leaves rimmed in fiery blue. As she swept the petals into a wastebasket, Brisling noticed a course tremor in the woman's hands.
"So, how can I help?" she said.
"Dr. Shapiro says you've worked here since 1992."
"1991, actually. I was Rachel'sâDr. Shapiro'sâfirst hire. I've been with her ever since." She fell silent. Then swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I had to cut back to half-time a few months ago . . . for medical reasons."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She raised her hand, sniffling. "No, I'm sorry. You don't need to hear this."
Brisling waited the requisite amount of time. Then he asked his question. "Did you know Carl Lundquist?"
She looked up sharply, brown eyes bleary. "Carl? Yeah, I knew him."
"Did he work here in 1992?"
"Yep. He worked next door. But he was only there for a year, maybe sixteen months, then they shut down the lab. They left everything behind. We junked most of it and kept a few things for ourselves, including this plant." She swept more of its petals into her hand and brushed them into the wastebasket.
"Do you know what Carl was working on back then?"
"Well, their lab did a lot of contract work for the state medical examiner's office, mostly RFLP on blood samples and some occasional stuff from the State Crime Lab."
"Was he working with live viruses or recombinant DNA technology?"
"Absolutely not. I would have known if he was doing BSL-3 work." She paused. "Is Carl in some sort of trouble?"
An odd question. "No," said Brisling.
"Do you know how he's doing?"
Two odd questions. He turned to face her. "May I ask why you want to know?"
Now it was Barbara's turn to gaze out the window. After a long pause, she said, "I've been doing a lot of reflection lately, looking back on how I've treated people in my life. Just the other day, I was thinking about Carl. I wasn't very nice to him."
"What do you mean?"
"He asked me out on a date once, and I was a total bitch about it. He was nice enough, I suppose, but kind of a slob, I mean like really grimy. And we didn't hang out in the same crowds at all. He was a Mötley Crüe and Poison type of guy, and I was more of an Enya and Cranberries girl. I was way into the Irish music scene back then. Wasn't everyone?"
No. "Why did they shut down the lab?"
"Something happened. It's the reason I asked if he was in trouble. Carl was working on a specimen from the Burns Ice Manâyou know, that prehistoric body those college students found in a cave. It was pretty controversial at the time."
Brisling vaguely remembered. "What type of specimen was Carl working on?"
"Body fluids, I think."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Um . . . I want to say stomach contents, but I'm not sure."
"Do you think the specimen could still be here?"
"No. That I'm sure of." She went to a back room and retrieved a cardboard box. Setting it on the black slate of the lab workbench, she said, "Aside from the equipment and the plants, this is all that's left."
The box contained several laboratory notebooks. Slipping on a pair of nitrile exam gloves, Brisling rummaged through them until he found one covering the second half of 1992. He thumbed through the pages, white for original, yellow for the carbon copy. They were mostly filled with hand-written notes describing simple molecular biology protocols, calculations for molarity and pH. Three quarters of the way through, the writing stopped abruptly, the remaining pages blank. He was about to close to notebook when he noticed the line of stubble in the cleft. Hastily, he checked the page numbers, forwards and backwards. Yes, someone had removed nearly ten pages of notes, along with their carbon copies.
Brisling looked up at Barbara. "Why are there pages missing?"
"Because they took Carl's specimen and all the data he collected on it."
"Who took it?"
"Federal marshals. They just stormed in one morning and confiscated everything."
Brisling shivered at the memory of federal agents raiding his own office and labs at the CDC, the shock of it, the shame. "Why did they do that?"
"Because the Native Americans won their lawsuit."
Now Brisling remembered the Burns Ice Man, the raging debates, the editorials and counter-editorials, scientific domain vs. Native American sovereignty.
"Some local tribe took custody of the body and buried it," Barbara was saying. "Nobody knows where."
Brisling's head began to throb. Was there a connection? Carl Lundquist was the leading candidate for patient zero, the first to be infected with JCAV, late in 1992. At that exact same time, he was handling a specimen from the Burns Ice Man, a prehistoric body preserved in cave iceâa body claimed by Native Americans, one of the two groups immune to JCAV's effects. Was there a connection? How could there be?
Brisling wandered back to the window, snapped off his exam gloves and tossed them in the wastebasket with all those dried-up flower petals. Gazing out, he let his forehead bump against the cool glass of the window. The sun was setting now, its weird ochre light feathering down onto the city below. It all seemed to be rusting before his eyes, grinding to a halt, dying, disintegrating.
The data are the data.
A prehistoric body. A man-made virus.
The data are the data, no matter what.
________________
Author's note:
Thanks for reading Chapter 32!
I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions.
-Frode
Image taken from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/491385009312541024/