Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,12
were being robbed of more and more precious kid time. But to Cole, who could not wait to be sprung from the trap of adolescence, this was totally wack.
He had his iPod with him and was inserting the ear buds when she said, “You want something to worry about? Let me tell you, Dad and I are already paying for the kind of music we listened to growing up. You want articles? I can show you articles, I can show you studies—” The rest of her words were lost. He was out the door, his iPod turned up max.
BY THE TIME THEY MOVED TO INDIANA, the first wave of the flu had come and gone. None of them had caught it. (“See?” said his mother. “We Vinings are made of sturdy stuff.”)
In Chicago there had been dozens of cases of infection but only one real horror story. In a nursing home on the South Side, all but two of the residents had died. But what did you expect? A filthy overcrowded place like that. Old people whose health had been so neglected for so long, they had no resistance to any germs.
Though the first wave had hit much of Illinois and other parts of the Midwest, in southern Indiana, where Little Leap was, there were only a few cases, all mild.
When the second wave hit, everyone hoped it, too, would be mild. A hope that died by the end of the first week.
Later many people would say that if the schools had been closed right away, lives might have been saved. But at the time people argued that you couldn’t just close the schools, because so many parents worked. If they had to stay home to take care of their kids, a lot of them would lose income, maybe even their jobs. Not to mention that businesses were already shorthanded because of all the employees out sick. Closing the schools might just make things worse.
But even before schools were officially closed, many parents had started keeping their kids home. Because teachers were getting sick, too, and there weren’t enough subs, classes had to be combined.
“How stupid can you get?” a teacher who’d been fired for refusing to go in to work told reporters. “Anywhere people are crowded together is bad, but with school kids we’re talking about a perfect storm of contagion.”
From Addy in Berlin came the news that all social gatherings had been banned except for weddings and funerals, where the number of people could not be higher than twelve. (“I wonder if that’s counting the bride and groom,” Cole’s mother said, and his father joked: “How about the corpse?”)
In city after city, all over the world, the number of people appearing in surgical masks kept multiplying. Those still capable of frivolity added illustrations: luscious lips, stuck-out tongues, piano-keyboard smiles, and—most popular—vampire fangs. In Indianapolis, after hundreds of people fell ill over one weekend, no one was permitted to go out without a mask. But—as happened almost everywhere—there weren’t enough masks to go around. Some made do with scarves or other pieces of cloth, or they tried taping gauze or paper to their faces. A lot of people just ignored the rule—and got away with it, the police being out sick in droves.
But a homeless man caught spitting in the street was mobbed and beaten to death.
The day before Cole’s school finally closed was spooky. The halls had never been so quiet. The sound of a ball being bounced in the school yard was like the sound of a heavy door slamming. And when the bell rang, everyone nearly jumped out of their skin.
Cole’s last day of school turned out to be his father’s last day of school, too.
When the first college students started getting sick, some health officials called for nationwide campus quarantines. They warned that letting all those active young people—many of whom were already infected, though they might not know it yet—travel around the country, using all means of public transportation, would spread a disease that seemed to be growing more contagious by the hour. Much safer for them to stay put. A drastic measure, to be sure. But the rate of infection among college students was turning out to be drastically high—higher than any other group except prison inmates. Cancel classes and all other school business, these officials urged, but please keep those kids in the dorms.
The outrage with which students reacted to this proposal was matched by the outrage of their parents, who wanted