out properly for a night. Have you got some? You should take it as soon as you get on the plane.” She was annoyed that, for a doctor, Henry was so resistant to taking medications.
“I will sleep again when I feel you next to me,” he said, in one of those maddening endearments that would ring in her ears until he came home.
“Don’t take chances,” Jill said pointlessly.
“I never do.”
2
The Blue Lady
From the air, Henry could see blazes in Sumatra. The native forests and peatland were being torched to make way for more palm plantations. Tbey supplied the oil used in about half the packaged products found in supermarkets, from peanut butter to lipstick. Each year, smog from the fires blanketed Southeast Asia, killing as many as a hundred thousand people in some seasons, and pushing global warming to a tipping point. As soon as Henry stepped outside the Jakarta airport and stood in the taxi queue, the heavy air scorched his nostrils. He looked at the masses of travelers coming and going and thought: Asthma, lung cancer, pulmonary disease, each inflicting its own cruel method of death. He had a professional habit of seeing pathology wherever he turned.
The monsoon season was under way. Black clouds were pregnant with rain, and the streets were swamped from the last downpour. Jakarta was a city of shantytowns, but also of skyscrapers sinking slowly into the earth. The booming population kept sucking water from the aquifer beneath their feet, causing the ground they lived on to collapse as the sea around them continually rose. It’s a form of civic suicide, Henry thought.
“First time in Jakarta?” the driver asked.
Henry’s mind was a long way off. The rain had begun again, and traffic had halted in a cacophony of frustration. A boy on a donkey cart piled ten feet high with chicken cages passed them on the sidewalk.
“I’ve been many times,” said Henry. Indonesia was a hothouse of diseases, a wonderful place for epidemiologists to practice their craft. The politics didn’t help. At this very moment there was a measles outbreak, brought on in part by a fatwa against the vaccine. HIV was spreading more rapidly here than in any other part of the world, which the government used to justify its persecution of homosexuals and transgender people.
The driver was portly and cheerful, sporting one of those round, brimless hats that Indonesian Muslims favor. A sprig of jasmine hung on the rearview mirror, its fragrance suffusing the stifling cab. Henry caught sight of the driver’s reflection. He was wearing sunglasses, despite the rain, which was now pelting the windshield like bullets.
“You want a tour of old Java, boss?”
“I’m just here for the day.”
Traffic thinned a bit as they neared the Indonesian Ministry of Health, but the rain did not relent. Henry saw clearly that he was going to be soaked before he got to the canopied entrance.
“Wait, boss, I help.” The driver opened the trunk and retrieved Henry’s suitcase, then held an umbrella as he escorted Henry to the door. “You come many times to Jakarta but you don’t bring an umbrella in the monsoon,” the driver chided.
“I’ve learned my lesson this time.”
“You want me to wait?”
“I don’t know how long this will take,” Henry said. “Maybe an hour.”
“I am here for you, boss,” the driver said, handing Henry his card: “Bambang Idris At Your Service.”
“Terima kasih, Bambang,” Henry said, exhausting his Indonesian vocabulary.
* * *
—
THREE HOURS LATER, Henry was still seated in the ministry’s antechamber with a dozen other somnolent petitioners. The tea boy looked at him expectantly, but Henry was fully caffeinated and his patience was at an end. Getting home was the only thing that mattered. He checked his reservation on his phone again. Still time to get to the camp and pick up the slides and then race to the airport. Just. Boarding for the midnight flight to Tokyo was in eight hours. If he missed that, he would miss Teddy’s birthday. All because of some pointless bureaucratic one-upmanship.
The last time Henry had cooled his heels in this room was in 2006. There was a different health minister then, Siti Fadilah Supari, who refused to share samples for H5N1, an avian influenza virus with deadly potential. More than half of the six hundred humans infected from the birds, most of them in Indonesia, had died of the disease. If H5N1 had become transmissible across the human population, it could have swept the globe in a matter of weeks, with calamitous consequences.