Anthony switches off the TV with a decisive click.
“That’s enough news for tonight,” he says quietly before pulling me into his arms.
ELIZABETH
London, United Kingdom
Day 37
As I get off the plane, I’m asked to step to one side. Immediately I panic that I’ve made an egregious mistake at work and the US government has decided I need to be dealt with while I’ve been on the flight to London. I’m never sure how to marry up the objective ability of my brain as a scientist with the feeling I so often have that I’ve done something wrong.
“Ms. Cooper, I have a car here to take you to see Dr. Kitchen.” The man is subtly well dressed and serious.
A sleek business car is waiting for me. I gulp but try to eke out a friendly smile even though I’m unnerved. Government science departments don’t tend to be Mercedes S-Class kinds of places. At least not for small-time visitors like me.
We make our way swiftly through the gray streets of West London snaking away from Heathrow. Everything looks so normal. Nobody is freaking out, yelling in the streets. There are Christmas lights up as the city prepares for the holidays. There’s traffic and a garbage truck making its way slowly down the road and a woman with her daughter on the way to school, unicorn-covered backpack bouncing up and down as they walk down the street.
Maybe this was all a mistake. I cringe at the memory of the conversation with my boss that led me here. It took every ounce of strength, and a lot of the techniques I learned at an “Assertiveness for Women in the Workplace” workshop, not to apologize, back out of his office slowly and leave as if nothing had happened. I didn’t though. For the first time in my life since I was eighteen, I was bold and brave and maybe even a little reckless. I use the example of Stanford versus Ole Miss whenever I need to feel like I’m making the right choices; it never fails me. My parents were so sure they were right and I was wrong. Who did I think I was acting like I was too good for the University of Mississippi? They were convinced Stanford would be an expensive waste of time. They were wrong. I was right. I need to remember that more often.
My boss is expecting me back in three weeks, in time to start work again by January. “The European Plague is going to die out, Elizabeth. It’s clearly got some kind of genetic component.” His arrogance is breathtaking. He’s not a geneticist and neither am I. I aspire to think so much of my own opinion that, having never even seen it under a microscope, I can blithely reassure someone that a virus has a genetic element, using the justification of an area of science I don’t even have a master’s in. I know for certain that this is where I need to be. What’s the point in having spent nine years getting my undergrad degree, master’s and PhD specializing in vaccine development if not to help find a cure for a disease? This is what I did all of that work for. It’s not just to have certificates on the wall.
It’s lucky that I even saw the e-mail from Dr. Kitchen. I had been covering for Jim—who’s such a moron I still can’t believe that he a） got into Yale; b） works at the Centers for Disease Control and c） has the same job as me. In his e-mail, Dr. Kitchen sounded desperate and sensible and reasonable and terrified.
Two incredibly awkward conversations involving my dubious bosses, a long-haul flight and a car ride later and here I am. In the week since I responded to Dr. Kitchen and arranged this trip the crisis here has worsened. Back home the racist rhetoric is predictably ramping up. It’s not our Plague, it’s not our problem. This is happening to the UK because of all those African and Middle Eastern immigrants. It’s not going to happen to us. We’re going to keep them out. I’m banning flights from London as soon as I can. It hasn’t happened yet but a growing part of me is worried that my return ticket for a flight home will lose any power to get me there. As I stare up at the imposing white stone of Whitehall I’m overcome by a wave of homesickness. What am I doing here? I could be in my lovely garden back home, picking tomatoes and spinach and scallions from the soil for my dinner. Instead I shiver as I’m led through the door into a vast hallway and through a never-ending warren of corridors.