Streams of Babel

  "We discovered that four times between 1998 and 2000, during Omar's tenure at the University of Hamburg, he made trips to an obscure island in the Soviet Union, where Q fever has amassed in the systems of wild goats, birds, silver foxes ... It has developed in a mushroom that has overtaken the roots of trees. Q fever was cultivated on that island during the germ warfare period of the Cold War. Though the Geneva Convention stopped further development of biochemical weapons in the late 1960s, what was in the air there continued to cultivate. It was from the cultures of this Q fever that he developed Q3. He developed the waterborne agent either in Hamburg or in a lab somewhere near Astor College. We haven't found the lab. I'd love to say Q3 didn't work out very well, but those four kids down in Jersey would find that statement offensive."

  "So where is Omar?" I ask. "Have you captured him?"

  Roger switches to another photo, which uploads slowly. As I wait for his answer, I try to remember what came next in my father's most memorable "people" speech, but I cannot. I am cognizant instead of a piece of a famous saying: "Of the People, by the People, for the People..."

  Maybe my father had gone on to say that, maybe not. But obviously, the People is something mass killers don't feel affection toward.

  "We haven't found him," Roger confesses. "We traced two credit card numbers he was using all over South Jersey since December. Neither has been used since last week. We're reasonably certain he hasn't gotten out of any of our international airports, but we can't vouch for Canada's or Mexico's."

  I hold my disappointment in silence. I sense in my deepest instincts that he is gone, far away.

  "Ten men are in custody," Roger says to placate me. "They include PiousKnight and members of ShadowStrike, most of whom were living in Europe. They're being extradited, and we will try them in America"

  "How did you find them?" I ask, feeling jealous that he could accomplish so much when I am stuck here. However, his answer makes me smile.

  "Tell Tyler his Dog Leash program is a gem. It leashed a couple of suspects and then leashed them to others. Fast and furiously. It filled in a lot of holes"

  I wish Tyler were present to hear that.

  "And VaporStrike?" I ask. I have wandered through the months of vague chatter and suspect that Catalyst and PiousKnight were foot soldiers, and VaporStrike was Omar's colleague, perhaps a very ambitious and dangerous officer in ShadowStrike.

  "Gone also," Roger says. "We'll find them. I promise. That's not for you to worry about. It's just that you've worked so long and so hard, I'm telling you this much as a professional courtesy."

  The obvious question pours out of my mouth. "And how do you expect to find him without me?"

  "Shahzad, don't goad me while I'm busy feeling sorry for you" is his only answer. I reach for the terminal and clutch it, but my grip is not as strong as his, and besides, the sleep medication makes me care slightly less.

  "Fine, have your laptop." I sweep it toward him with reproach. "I would love to have your terminal and to help you search for these two men, but I am not in the habit of sacrificing my dignity. I am more concerned with 'the People' at present, namely the one who was in the bed next to me. Please tell me that you haven't lost track of Tyler, also."

  "He's doing okay. He's on the psych ward, talking to a psychotherapist."

  "That is a type of doctor?" I try to recall.

  "Yes. Hodji's with him, too."

  I feel peaceful, even outstanding for a moment, over something I cannot quite explain. It is about my primary focus being on Tyler, a person, rather than the laptop, an information receptor, which had been right in my fingers.

  "And now ... Dr. Briglianni is here to show you something else." Roger hits the touch pad again, and a different sort of picture comes up on the screen. Omar is gone, and in his place are roundish orange circles floating in a dark pool. It looks like a science photo.

  Dr. Briglianni comes to the other side of me and points at the screen, saying, "Hodji told me to tell you the whole truth, so I'm telling you."

  Tyler and I had asked Hodji to extend to us this courtesy, but I find the daily results falling somewhere between irritating and terrifying. It's not that I wish I had not said it. I just wish the results were coming out differently than they are. The picture of my blood that I was shown yesterday had, perhaps, half as many of these orange circles floating in it. From the day preceding that, they had doubled as well.

  "The good news is," Dr. Briglianni went on, "that now that we have identified the germ agent, we can tell other things, such as the gestation period, and more importantly, how to quell its effects."

  "You know what the germ is?" I repeat.

  "Yes"

  He clears his throat, which forces my words out.

  "Only tell me it is not smallpox, please. I have seen images of its victims on the Internet. It is better to be dead."

  "It is not smallpox," he says.

  I sigh in relief, but only for a second.

  "It is a mutated form of ulceroglandular tularemia."

  I think of Omar's online allusion to creating other vinegars and play the terminology through my head. Tularemia is a bioterroristic agent, but not as dreaded as smallpox. I cannot remember much about it on the spot. The first term has the root words ulcer and gland in it. My stomach starts to dance and sway in upset.

  "You can get rid of it?" I ask.

  "We would have been trying all the antibiotics we've been trying so far, plus an antiviral, which we will start you on immediately."

  "So, you can't."

  He clears his throat again. "We have alerts out to drug specialists on four continents. We'll come up with something, don't you worry."

  I close the lid of the laptop, so I am not looking at these ever-multiplying orange blasts. They are shaped like hearts, if we care to discuss absurdity at its finest—reddish orange hearts in a bed of dark green fluid. I am a computer man, not a scientist. I had never processed the thought before this week that photographed blood can appear dark green.

  "What shall I expect?" I ask as Roger whisks the laptop away.

  "Do you know what a gestation period is?" the doctor asks.

  "Yes." It is the time between when one is infected with a germ and when it begins to show symptoms. I have read as much.

  "We believe this germ has an approximate ten-day gestation period, and it is not my opinion that we can find an effective medication in the next few days. Hence, next week you may break with a fever, and your skin will turn bright red, and a rash will start to—"

  "Never mind," I cut him off. "I don't wish to hear it"

  Roger offers, "The thing won't kill you, Shahzad. The other assurance we have is that it won't affect your vital organs. The CDC believes it will go mainly after skin tissue."

  "Correct," Dr. Briglianni adds.

  My memory is probably more remarkable than most people's, but it is not always a good thing. One passage I read about tularemia months ago floats to the forefront, along with a picture of ulcerated skin lesions and the remaining scars. I will not look like a smallpox victim, but it could be hideous nonetheless.

  I wish to ask for Hodji but remain silent. He has watched over me for days, feeling guilty to the extreme for not removing Tyler and me from Catalyst's reach, for not having the imagination to conceive of his unprecedented intentions. It had been tricky for him, and I never cease to remind him that his guilt is unfounded in a situation for which there are no existing protocols.

  He has since provided the details of how he came to find Tyler and me in time. He had been late to meet Roger at the hospital the day that Tyler and I went there because he had been tailing us the whole way. Perhaps USIC meant it when saying they didn't have time to check up on us, but Hodji made the time.

  Seeing our direction, he reasoned that I wanted to see the sick youths and waited in his car to see what we would do next. He called in a "hunch" After Roger took that call from Michael outside, the one that made me flee in haste, he called Hodji, tel
ling him with many explosions that USIC would haul our bad behavior to the local juvenile detention center and book us. If Hodji had done that immediately, he might never have found Catalyst and PiousKnight, who was Manuel.

  Hodji's instincts are good. He followed us again and put two and two together that we were on our way to Astor College. He was able to get a raid organized in twenty minutes. If he hadn't followed us and done all that, we would probably be walking around with scratches, wondering at our "luck," that Catalyst had tried to scratch us like a small child instead of saw off our limbs. Hodji, Susan, and Michael had said that these men were dangerous beyond our wildest dreams. And in my wildest dreams I never pictured a man who would load up his own flesh and sacrifice his life to meet an end.

  Had it not been for Hodji, Catalyst might be with Omar instead of dead. Things worked out slightly better this way, but I cannot help but say my thought—about being scratched in the face, and playing host to an ugly germ in the sixth day of a ten-day gestation period.

  "This entire situation is absurd," I report.

  Roger and Dr. Briglianni say nothing.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  CORA HOLMAN

  FRIDAY, MARCH IS, 2002

  12:21 P.M.

  JEREMY IRELAND LOOKED at me with affection, patted my hair, and said, "No."

  It was not as easy as usual to hide my emotions. I had never been completely convinced he was my father, but to hear him clearly say no, he was not, sent me into some emotional freefall. My jaw trembled, my lips trembled, and I tried desperately to focus on my fingers, how my nails needed filing.

  "I'm gay," he went on.

  I didn't exactly see the problem with that. There were gay men all over the planet who had been married or had had kids.... The answer irritated me. It was too cut-and-dry for a complicated situation.

  "What I mean by that," he said, "is that your mother and I never..."

  I guess that was evidence enough that he wasn't my father, but it left before me many mysteries, the least of which was Then, who is? I decided that if he knew, he would certainly have said as much—even if he didn't feel comfortable providing a name. Pictures formed in my head of Aleese, drunk after a hard photo shoot, flirting with one guy after another in some journalists' bar. If my roots were that loveless, I was not ready to hear it.

  "But ... you loved her," I said. "So much..."

  "I worshipped her. I still do." He stood and put on his jacket.

  He left me numbers in London where I could call him if I needed anything—anytime. I needed time alone right now, my usual diet, to digest my life under these new terms.

  Unfortunately, after Scott got out of intensive care, he was moved in with Owen, and I now had Rain in the other bed. She came in, pushing an IV and grumbling. She'd become more quiet these days. She wasn't her usual vivacious self, and she even offered no opinion when her father mentioned that they were sending us to a rehab facility fifteen miles from here. I would have thought she'd collapse, but all she'd said was "I'm still going to the prom ... I don't care how I do it."

  "Did you see that stack of homework our teachers sent over in case we were bored?" Rain grumbled.

  Before I could answer, Owen followed her in a wheelchair being pushed by Dobbins. Owen immediately dropped himself into her bed, and she said, "No dibs! I'm tired."

  The room was a convention when Dempsey followed them, holding up an envelope filled with papers. He dangled it by two fingers, implying it was the dreaded homework we'd heard was coming.

  "And get this, Cora," Rain grumbled on. "Mclntyre sent us an essay to write for history. And he just gave us the same one as everyone else. He wants us to tell him what it means to be an American in 2002. How in the hell do we answer that?"

  No one noticed my tears until I tried to answer. My "I hadn't heard" trembled.

  She came over and lay down beside me, and Dempsey sat at the foot of the bed. I could feel Owen watching me. Dobbins took a seat beside Owen. I was utterly surrounded.

  "Your dad leave?" Rain asked.

  I felt like I was being thrown out of a truck. Or maybe it was that the truck was roaring up my throat. But I could feel myself snapping and cracking, and finally some sobbing alien stepped out of me and took control.

  "He's not my dad. I kind of doubted he was my dad, but I wanted to find out. I have no idea who my dad is. I don't have any relatives and ... I don't have any friends, either."

  Their reactions amazed me, though I don't know why. It was filled with, perhaps, the last thing I would have wanted to hear them say, but I could not have predicted the amount of sincerity with which they would say it.

  "...and we're chopped liver?"

  "...we're your friends, Cora..."

  "...your friends..."

  "We're your..."

  "...friends."

  And on and on. I didn't know what to say, but I knew "thank you" was wrong. It was a harmony—off-key, but humming.

  Owen ended it with "Come over here and I'll hug you. But you have to come over here. I'm not having a four-star day."

  I almost went to him. But in keeping, I took a tissue from the box Dobbins held out to me. I blew my nose rather hard, and didn't realize until I tried to use two hands that Rain was holding my one hand. I didn't try to pull it away. It felt very normal.

  After a minute, she said, "You know what we should do? We should all try to keep a diary. Bet we could get out of a lot of English and history homework by promising that instead."

  Owen laughed at her. "You're going to keep a diary? I'd like to see you write more than three sentences in your life without getting distracted."

  "This is serious, though," she said. "It's, um, stirring my need to be lit'rary. To keep a record, at least."

  "It's a shame you can't punctuate," Dempsey giggled.

  "I'll say it all into a tape recorder," Rain countered. "Don't some really important CEOs keep their diaries that way? Maybe when all of this is over, we'll find a famous editor who can type it out for me."

  "I'll type it out," I said. "I'll edit." It sounded like a me project, and if I was to be their friend, I would long feel a nagging need to repay the debt somehow.

  I sat among them, and let them do all the talking, but it was the first time since Oma died that I felt something akin to relaxed. Despite an IV, despite the surroundings, and despite an unpredictable future.

  Life is a mystery, but that's nothing new to me.

  FORTY-NINE

  WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE AN AMERICAN TODAY

  By Rain Steckerman

  HISTORY 4

  MARCH 15, 2002

  HI, MR. MCINTYRE. You know I hate writing essays—I hate writing anything, in fact, but I also know you are nicer than Ms. Curcio, who won't let us start our English papers with anything but a totally boring introduction. I know you won't be counting off for saying the truth from the start, right?

  It is hard for me to think about being American. I am busy thinking about what it is like to be here in a hospital.

  You've heard by now what happened to us, I guess. My dad held a press conference this morning. Bet you had the TV on in the classroom, like you always do, but this time the scenery and the names were a little more familiar. Anyway, these terrorists opened a discount shoe store over in Surrey and pretended to run it, and on December 28 they poisoned the water.

  They only poisoned five streets, but I live on one of them, and so do the Ebermans and so does Cora Holman. The Holmans and the Ebermans drank tons of tap water, and so did I cuz I was always over at Owen's house (no, we do not go out, though I know that has been a rumor for some time among people who don't really know us. All I ever did over there was drink the water—honestly. Back to my story). So now, we have this germ that the Centers for Disease Control is calling Q3. We are very glad they caught those men, but I don't like to focus on them. It arouses our puke factors, let's leave it at that.

  Right now we have Q3 in our blood and in our bone marrow, and they can clean it out
of our blood, but it just comes back from the bone marrow. Doctors are working hard in all these very kewl cities like Vienna and Sydney and Minneapolis to figure out how to get rid of it. I'm guessing they will figure it out soon.

  The worst to get hit of us kids was Scott. He had an aneurysm both in his heart and in his head. I got so scared he would die. He got lucky because there was one easy surgery they could do if the aneurysm near his heart was the right shape and size, and it turns out it was. They cauterized it with a microscopic blowtorch. If it had been a rip-open-your-ribcage surgery, he'd still be in that coma, unable to go through that much trauma. Sometimes I wish he was still out of it, because he is very pissed and he can get very mouthy. He needs to take an anger management class.

  Owen is okay, good days and bad, but he floors me. There's a chapel in this hospital, and you're allowed to light candles in there. He lit four on one side and ten on the other. The four are for us. Get this: The other ten candles Owen lit were for the bad guys. Bob Dobbins was all "He's totally lost it. Those guys should burn in hell." I agree, but I know Owen, and even on his worst day, he will not feel good about people going to hell. Here's what he said:

  "Hell is a place for.." Wait a minute, he's right here. I will let him write what he feels, because he can say it better. (This part still goes toward my grade, not his.)

  I just don't believe in passing judgment until you can put yourself in the other guy's shoes. I don't know if they're arrogant or confused or scared or stupid or ... I just don't want to eliminate any possibilities until I can understand. The thought of ten people burning in hell makes me feel less satisfaction instead of more. I believe that heaven and hell don't exist for what personally makes me glad or what personally pisses me off. I do think there will be murderers in heaven. Don't you? They can't just include "anyone except the one who came after my family," right?