Mitty was not familiar with VM, but it occurred to him that if VM could cause an epidemic, it had to be an infectious disease. Mitty brightened. He didn't care if VM had a common name, a long history or a current event. He didn't care if it had ever shown up in New York City or could be used by bioterrorists. He cared only that he had his topic.
A 102-year-old scab could be used as show-and-tell, although that was kind of a second-grade phrase. For high school, Mitty would call this an artifact. A tiny mummified body part—if a scab could be called a body part. Nobody else would come up with that for their report.
First he had to figure out what VM stood for.
VD he knew: venereal disease; he hoped that was not what VM was, because he didn't like thinking about sexually transmitted diseases and didn't want to be known as the guy who researched them. Next he tried to remember the true names of shots you got when you were little. They had just had a class on it, but Mitty had not been listening. OPV was oral polio vaccine. DPT was … diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus.
No VM in that group. Mitty had a brainstorm and turned to the index. There weren't many entries under V, and only one VM: variola major—which, wonderfully, had an entire chapter to itself.
“Mitty!— yelled his father.
“Here!— Mitty shouted back.
“Your mother wants to leave now!— yelled his father.
There were clues in this shout. His father did not want to leave now. He did not want to leave so much that instead of saying “Mom wants,— he was assigning Mom to Mitty—she had become that grim person,“your mother.— Mitty knew that on the drive home, his job was to be on both sides of whatever this issue was.
Roxbury was ninety miles northeast of New York City, and since Dave Blake had always yearned to be a NASCAR driver, they'd get back to the city fast—long before Barnes & Noble closed. Mitty could get new books. He had never pulled an all-nighter, since his commitment to study rarely lasted longer than ten minutes, but he liked the idea of an all-nighter. Olivia routinely stayed up all night studying, even when she'd been studying for weeks in a row already. Now he could boast that he too had worked through the night.
He dropped the scab into the envelope with the crumbles, stuck the envelope back into the book without rewinding the string and threw the book into his book bag. Then, since it was remotely possible that B & N would fail him, he threw in the other three ancient books. They were all worthless, but Mr. Lynch had just specified four books; he hadn't said they had to be worth anything.
Mitty and his father waited patiently while Mitty's mom skittered around the house, checking things nobody else cared about, like leftover milk. At last she was in the car and Mitty's dad took off. Mitty meant to read up on VM, but he fell asleep instead.
Variola major is a virus.
A virus is not precisely a living creature. It has no system for the intake of food or oxygen. It has no personality, no brain. It has one task: to take over the cells of other creatures.
Scab particles were in Mitty Blake's fingerprints. He had wiped them on his cheek and rubbed them against his nose. He had breathed them in.
Every virus, although not quite alive, nevertheless has a shelf “life.” The shelf life of some viruses is known; the shelf life of others is uncertain.
In this case, it was the shelf life of Mitchell John Blake that was uncertain.
CHAPTER TWO
“H ave a nice nap, darling?” asked his mother, reaching over the front seat to ruffle her son's hair.
Mitty stretched happily. He could lie down anytime, anywhere, and sleep soundly for ten hours. Twelve, even. People could sit on him and watch television, have arguments and clean up after a sick dog, and Mitty would never know.
His dad handed over the car keys to the parking attendant while Mitty grabbed his backpack. It was amazingly heavy. What did he have in there—tire irons? He opened the bag. What had been his logic, wasting space on four pathetic—
He had not checked before tossing the books in. Thereat the bottom, splayed open—in fact, crushed—was his classroom copy of Beowulf. Mitty recalled now that there would be a test on Beowulf in the morning. He could not believe this was happening. After he had planned so carefully! There would have been plenty of time to get to the bookstore, take notes …
Naturally he hadn't read Beowulf yet. He had a dim recollection that they had been talking about Beowulf in class—at least, other people had been talking; certainly Mitty himself had contributed nothing—and he recalled also that it was hard to read, being in some antique, dusty form of English. Or maybe Greek.
“Mitty?” his mother said gently, because he had forgotten to get out of the car.
His parents were partial to huge canvas bags made by L.L. Bean, and when they traveled between the city and the country, these were filled to overflowing with groceries, laundry and extra sweaters. Since Mitty loved anything involving muscle power, he was always ready to lug and carry. He slung a Bean bag over each shoulder, hoisted one in each hand and also managed his backpack.
The driveway up from the public parking lot under their apartment building was steep. Mitty loved steep. He liked the tightening of his leg muscles when he was walking uphill. He passed their building's tiny front garden and said hi to Carlos, the doorman on duty. Mitty's building had doormen and a concierge at the front desk 24/7. Days and evenings, the back service entrance was also manned—this was where packages arrived, dry cleaning or takeout was delivered and moving men schlepped furniture.
A doorman helped with strollers and shopping bags,carried luggage, gave an arm to old people struggling to get out of cars, closed up wheelchairs, gave directions and, above all, remembered faces. Nobody could wander in. Guests had to stop at the desk, where the concierge would telephone your apartment on the house line and say“Derek's here?” and you'd say“Send him up,” and then Derek could walk around to the elevators. But since the staff did remember faces, pretty soon when Derek came, they knew him and just waved him up.
While his father picked up the mail, Mitty's mother chatted with Eve at the front desk to see if anything interesting had happened since Friday when they had hauled out of town, but nothing had. At last, the three of them were in the elevator, headed for the eighth floor.
Their hall was nondescript. Nobody painted or decorated or hung anything or had wreaths or welcome mats. Nobody's taste was visible. And yet the building never felt musty or unused the way their country house did after a week away. In the apartment building, you could always smell somebody's perfume or dog or dinner, and in the hall, you could hear their television or their arguments. The minute you got inside your own apartment, though, no sound or vibration of neighbors was there with you; you were separate, yet surrounded.
Mitty loved his building.
“Mitty honey, help me unpack the bags,” said his mother.
In a million years Mitty would never understand why she brought groceries back and forth. Especially now, trapped between Beowulf and infectious disease, he did not want to get involved with leftover lettuce. He started to tell his mother he was busy, but she was smiling at him with such affection that he smiled back.“Sure,” he said cheerfully, andused up another precious ten minutes. Then he had to spend a while looking out the window. Considering how low they were, just the eighth floor, they had a great view, north up Amsterdam where it crossed Broadway. Both avenues were clogged with vans and trucks and buses and taxis. When the lights changed, even on this icy February evening, people poured across the street with their little tots zipped up under the plastic covers of their strollers, with their dogs and shopping carts, their briefcases and their bags and bags and bags of groceries. Mitty admired a bicycle delivery guy narrowly escaping death as he crossed streets against traffic while balancing pizzas.
New Yorkers were strong because they carried everything a suburbanite would drop in the backseat of his car. They were strong because they got so much more exercise: their lives were full of sidewalks, stairs
and detours; they were always running to grab a taxi, racing to catch a train and threading through crowds, while carrying what they needed, lacking a car to toss it in.
Mitty's family pretty much only used the car to go to the country. In town, it was a time-consuming pain just getting the car out of the underground lot, never mind fighting city traffic, but finding a parking space close enough to their destination so that there was any point in taking the car to start with was the real obstacle.
His father closed the door to his study, probably returning business calls or else ordering food (Mitty's dad loved delivery: there was nothing he would not have delivered; he certainly wouldn't walk across the street for books; he'd have Barnes & Noble deliver), and his mother closed the door to their bedroom, preparing for a shower (she took a mysteriously high number of showers, like Mittywith naps). Mitty got the Blockbuster card from the little stack of family-use cards on the kitchen counter (the Metropolitan Museum card; the public library card; the Museum of Natural History card), left the apartment, decided to take the stairs, pounded down eight flights as fast as a fugitive, or so he told himself, went out the back way, jogged around the corner and lucked out.
They had the movie.
“Dude,” said the movie guy, checking out Beowulf.“Is this for school?”
“Yes,” said Mitty. Why else would he look at it?
“Dude, you are so going to flunk your test,” said the movie guy. “It does have a monster named Grendel but nothing else matches. You gotta read the book.”
Mitty was awestruck.“ You read the book?”
“A decade ago.”
“You pass the test?”
“I'm working at Blockbuster. What's your guess?”
Mitty was still laughing when he got back to the apartment. He laughed until his cell phone rang.“You do your algebra yet?” asked Derek.
Of course he hadn't done his algebra yet.
Weekends were for rest, anybody knew that.
Mitty was actually doing fairly well in math, so now he faced another question: should he do his math first, thus maintaining a decent standing in one class, anyway, or try to accomplish something in Beowulf or something on his biology paper, maybe lifting himself to a passing grade in those classes—but risking failure in the one subject in which he was okay?
Mitty felt that watching the movie was a good response to this dilemma.
Having fallen asleep in the first few minutes of Beowulf, Mitty got up the following morning telling himself it was better to have had a good night's rest and be fortified with a hearty breakfast than to have actually done any homework.
He looked in on his parents, who rarely went to bed before midnight or one and rarely got up before nine. Mitty had been on his own in the morning ever since he could remember. He was always surprised and touched by the sight of his parents asleep. He couldn't look at them very long, or he would get a stab in his heart, as if these unconscious people needed him in some way he would never discover.
Mitty left the apartment silently, locked the door behind him, grabbed an elevator and went out the back. The high buildings of the West Side created canyons of slashing wind. Even Mitty, who liked the cold, braced himself against the February blast. He passed any number of diners, delis, sidewalk coffee vendors, coffee shops, corner groceries and bakeries, considering each one carefully. He was on the lookout for breakfast, and the decision was difficult: should he go the chewy route (bagel)—and if so, what flavor? Or should he go with soft and sweet (croissant, Danish) or have a fried egg and bacon on a roll?
He ended up with two Krispy Kreme original doughnuts, which he ate walking the remaining nine blocks to school, where he lucked out. In English, there was a sub. No Beowulf exam. Instead, they were sent to the library.
Mitty grabbed a computer screen and went to Google. He meant to research variola major, since it was now histopic, but even though he knew what the result would be, he typed in virus. This brought up 2.5 million hits: virus bulletins, antivirus advice and instructions for fighting off viruses. Of course, these hits were for computer viruses, but who cared?
When he got bored, Mitty did a search for variola major and was guided to the CDC site. This was a nice coincidence because, he remembered now, the CDC was supposed to be his first move anyway. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, has the premier site for reliable information for all of you except Melanie, who's doing plant disease,” Mr. Lynch had said.
Mitty scrolled around. Variola major turned out to be smallpox, a disease Mitty had vaguely heard of. It was medieval or something, like the Black Plague. It turned out that nobody got smallpox anymore. It had been destroyed decades ago. The CDC actually said, “Surveillance for a disease that does not currently exist anywhere in the world presents unique challenges.”
Surveillance for a disease that didn't exist sounded like something from a TV exposé: “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I get a huge salary from your tax dollars to oversee a disease that doesn't exist.”
Mitty did a news search to see what was up in the smallpox world. He found very little, which was reasonable, considering it didn't exist. He did locate a case of monkeypox in Wisconsin. Some people had bought a prairie dog for a pet, but it had spent time in the company of a Gambian giant rat from Africa, and the rat had a bad case of monkeypox, which the prairie dog caught and gave to one of its owners. Mitty felt that anybodynuts enough to have a prairie dog for a pet should not be surprised when they got diseases. He looked up monkeypox to see what rats in Gambia were up to that they were coming down with monkey diseases.
He was enchanted to find that just about any creature could have its own personal pox: there was skunk pox, pig pox and camel pox. Parrot pox, dolphin pox, and croc pox. There was even mosquito pox. Mitty was pretty sure that pox were spots, so exactly how did you spot spots on a mosquito's complexion? You'd have to have a seriously powerful microscope. The paragraph went on to explain that since bugs don't have skin, they also don't get a rash. Instead, the bug goes insane.
Right away Mitty had a new life plan: he would study insanity in insects. It seemed like a big field, probably without much competition because there would be so few paying patients.
When Mitty arrived in the school lunchroom, he was in an excellent mood, buoyed by thoughts of mosquito insanity. He sat with Derek and Olivia. He and Derek congratulated each other that they'd had a sub in English. Olivia would have the same sub when she went to English, which for her was the last period of the school day.
“Are you telling me neither one of you has read Beowulf yet?” said Olivia, frowning. “It's very short,” she said, implying that anybody could read it, even Mitty or Derek.
Mitty responded with pleasure, thinking how pretty she looked with that little crease of concern across her forehead. Derek responded with loathing, thinking how repellent she looked with that little crease of superiority across her forehead.
Mitty avoided suggestions that he ought to be reading, so he said,“How are you coming with typhoid?”
Olivia smiled back, which was one of her best points: she never clung to an annoying subject the way Mitty's mother and sister did. “I'm finding so much on the history of typhoid and it's so exciting,” she said, eyes sparkling with research joy. “I'm hoping Mr. Lynch will give me permission just to do typhoid history and not bother with current events and treatment. You see, I've found out about a woman named Mary Mallon who was responsible for infecting forty-seven people with typhoid, right here in New York City in the early nineteen hundreds. She was a cook and everybody she cooked for got typhoid because she had handled their food. Eventually she was known all over America for infecting people, so they called her Typhoid Mary. When the authorities finally caught her, since she was just a carrier and had never gotten sick herself, she refused to believe she was a problem and she refused to stop being a cook. So they locked her away in a prison on an island in the East River. What I want to do, Mitty, is visit th
at island. It's a bird sanctuary now. Want to come?”
Naturally Mitty wanted to invade a bird sanctuary in the Bronx in February in icy weather. Boats probably weren't allowed to dock at a bird sanctuary even in July, and the likelihood of finding a captain willing to sail through ice floes was low, and he and Olivia did not qualify as high-level bird-watchers deserving of such a treat, and furthermore, Typhoid Mary probably hadn't left any traces—but so what? “I'm on,” said Mitty. “What's the island?”
“North Brother,” said Olivia excitedly.
Mitty had never heard of it. But there was a surprisingly high number of islets around Manhattan. Liberty, Ellis and Rikers were the famous ones.
“I haven't figured out how to get there yet,” said Olivia worriedly.
“I have complete faith in you,” said Mitty, who did. He and Olivia had sat next to each other in two classes the year before and he had not noticed her. This year, they were in one class together and he noticed her every moment and thought about her every day, sometimes every hour. Mitty had mixed feelings about this. The reason he hadn't asked her out was that half his life was already spent thinking about her and he wasn't sure about handing over the other half as well.
Derek disliked topics that did not include him, so he said,“I, meanwhile, am trying to figure out the motive of the murderer of Ottilie Lundgren.”
Olivia turned her frown of concern upon Derek. “It was established that the person or persons who mailed that anthrax did not have individual victims in mind. Those deaths were random accidents.”
“They were random murders,” Derek corrected her. “I need to know the guy's motivation or I won't find him. See, normal people aren't killers. Normal people don't murder at all, let alone fly planes into occupied buildings or strap bombs to their chests and detonate themselves in pizza parlors. You have to be very hate-filled or very brainwashed to do those things, like say Mohammed Atta flying into the Twin Towers. On the other hand, Atta was crazy but had guts, whereas pouring dust into an envelope doesn't take guts. It's a weak act, so I'm looking for a weak person.”