As soon as he was well enough to go back to the lab, Jürgen asked for his findings. “I find that immunity remains a mystery,” Henry reported.
He did not mention Dr. Méyé or her observations about Jürgen, but after that, he studied his boss more carefully, searching for the qualities she had found unsettling. Perhaps the same qualities were also present in Henry, the ones that had enlisted him in this dangerous—some would say sinister—line of work.
24
Triple Play
“There’s a bunch of folks dead they’re not telling us about,” Mildred, a fourth-grade teacher, said, as Jill and others ate lunch in the teachers’ lounge. Up to now, they had been talking about how fortunate they were that Atlanta hadn’t been badly hit. Schools around the country had reopened as the pandemic lost its grip. People were returning to work, filling up restaurants, and flocking to theaters and sporting events. They stopped wearing respirator masks, drinking in the air that had just recently been so treacherous. Jill had decided to return to the city.
“Like who?”
“I’m sure Anderson Cooper is dead. He’s not on anymore.”
“I heard Brad Pitt is dead,” another teacher said.
“Oh, no!”
“You don’t know that.”
“But it is true about Taylor Swift.”
Mildred seemed excited by the turn in the conversation. The indiscriminate nature of death excited her populist ire. Mildred would have been manning the guillotine in revolutionary France. “They found a guy on the subway in New York who was fine when he left home and then he was dead like half an hour later,” Mildred continued. “A Wall Street guy.”
“Do they know how many people have died?” one teacher asked.
“They say more than two million in the U.S. alone,” said Jill. “But I don’t think anybody really knows.”
“The pension fund is, like, destroyed,” Mildred said.
The nation had emerged from the first wave of the pandemic to find that the stock market was down 13,500 points and the economy was in the steepest recession in history. American Airlines declared bankruptcy, and the travel ban threatened to bring down other carriers as well, shaking the entire transportation industry. It had never been so clear what herd animals humans were. Almost overnight, they had disappeared from the subways and buses and trains. And almost overnight, they returned, though in smaller numbers. The worst was over, people told themselves. Time to pick up life where we left it.
The pandemic was still acute in Europe and the Middle East, but after Philadelphia no other American city had been hit as hard. Some experts on CNN were suggesting that the virus had mutated into a less harmful form. Commentators on Fox were applauding the forceful actions of the administration for stopping the disease, citing the much-criticized travel ban.
Mildred wouldn’t stop. “Did you hear about the teacher who died in her classroom?” she asked. “Right in front of her students. Dropped dead.”
“Mildred, we’re alive!” one of the teachers declared.
“And we have our jobs,” another chimed in.
When Jill returned to her classroom she sat at her desk and watched the children returning from lunch. They faced a life of extra struggle, given the obstacles in front of them. The two Darrens, in addition to having the same name, both had fathers in prison. K’Neisha was the smartest in the class, and her mother, Vicky, did everything she could to protect her, but girls in her community were at a disadvantage no matter how smart and pretty they were. Jill believed that, despite the family problems and the absence of resources, these children would survive. Some of them would triumph. K’Neisha would.
Just don’t let anything bad happen to them, Jill thought.
* * *
—
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Jill went for a run in Lullwater Park. It was only a short walk from the CDC headquarters, and sometimes at lunch she and Henry would picnic by Candler Lake. She would feed Fritos to the mallards and the greedy resident swan who demanded the first serving. Loamy trails looped through the dense woods. Students were sunning themselves, surrounded by Canada geese munching on the grass. The students seemed a little too dazed by the splendid weather to be absorbed by their textbooks. Jill saw a couple kissing beside the lake. It was like a scene from another era.
She missed Henry more than ever. She knew that the world needed him. She wasn’t naive about his importance, but sometimes she thought about what it would be like to be old and to finally have Henry all to herself, the long