My lab （my lab!） is in one of the newer buildings, Larsson, part of which literally forms a bridge between Manhattan and a man-made landmass adjacent to Roosevelt Island. From my office, I can look over a slightly different view than the one I see from home: the water, the highway, the cement bridge, and Florence Houses East and West. All the labs here have official titles; mine is the Laboratory of Emerging and Incipient Infections. But when one of the service guys came early this morning to deliver my supply of Erlenmeyers, he asked, “You the Department of New Diseases?” I laughed, and he said, “What? Did I get it wrong?” and I told him he’d gotten it just right.
Sorry this has been so self-absorbed, but you did ask for it. Next week we have our final interviews with Immigration, after which we will be, officially, full-time, legal, permanent United States residents （eek!）。 Tell me what’s going on with you, and work, and that weirdo you’re seeing, and everything else. In the meantime, sending you love from the Department of New Diseases.
Your loving old pal, C.
Dear Peter, April 11, 2045
Thanks for your most recent note; it cheered me up a bit, which is a near-impossible feat these days.
I wonder, given how much you already know about these things （not to mention what’s happening in your part of the world）， whether you’ve already heard about the cutbacks, which are going to be rolled out before the end of summer and will supposedly affect every federal scientific agency in the country. The official line is that the money is being redirected toward the war, and in a way it is, but everyone in the community knows that the money is actually going to Colorado, where rumor has it they’re working on a new bioweapon of some kind. I’m lucky insofar as RU isn’t completely dependent on government grants, but it is still largely dependent on them, and I’m worried my own work is going to be affected.
Then there’s the fact of the war itself, which is really hampering me in other ways. The Chinese are, as you know, responsible for the most advanced and most diverse infectious-disease scholarship in the world, and the new sanctions mean we can’t communicate with them anymore—not officially, at least. There’s been months of back-channeling between us and NIH and the CDC and Congress ever since the sanctions were proposed last year, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference. Again, my work isn’t as affected as some of my colleagues’， but all that means is that it someday will be as affected, and so far, there’s nothing to be done.
It seems particularly insane that they should be doing this given the South Carolina incident—I don’t know if word made it to you, but in early February, there was an outbreak of an unknown virus just outside the town of Moncks Corner, in the southeast of the state, which is also home to a landscaped blackwater swamp called Cypress Gardens. A local woman—forties, otherwise healthy—became ill with what seemed to be a flu after being bitten by a mosquito while kayaking through the swamp. Forty-eight hours after diagnosis, she began seizing; seventy-two hours after, she was paralyzed; ninety-six hours after, she was dead. By this time, however, the woman’s son and their next-door neighbor, an elderly man, were displaying similar symptoms. It sounds, I know, a little like Eastern equine encephalitis, but it isn’t; rather, it’s a novel alphavirus. It was only good, weird, rare fortune that the town mayor had been, of all things, a missionary in East Africa during their ’37 chikungunya outbreak and suspected that something might be amiss; he contacted the CDC, and they came and locked down the town. The old man died, but the son lived. Of course, the CDC is treating this as a major triumph: Not only did the disease not spread but they also kept it out of the national news. They kept it out of the news altogether, actually—they in fact urged the president to order the mayor not to speak of it to any media, much less his citizens, which he did, and it’s rumored that this will lead next to an executive order that prohibits media outlets from publishing non-preapproved information about future outbreaks in the interest of national safety. The thinking is that panic would lead to people trying to flee the area, and early and aggressive containment is the only thing that halts a fast-spreading illness. I see the wisdom of this, of course, but I also think it’s a dangerous solution. Information has a way of finding its way around bans, and once the population discovers they’ve been lied to, or at the very least kept ignorant, it’ll only lead to greater mistrust and suspicion, and, therefore, even greater panic. But the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy.
Anyway, as I was saying—this is the context in which our funding is being cut? Can they really be so shortsighted as to think that this’ll be the last outbreak? There seems to be this unvoiced but persistent belief that illness is something that happens over there, and that, just because we have money and resources and a sophisticated research infrastructure, we’ll be able to halt any future disease in its tracks before it “gets too bad.” But what is “too bad,” and how do they propose we do this with less intelligence and fewer resources? I’m not one of those scientists—not like Wesley, bless his shriveled heart—who see apocalypse around every corner, who predict with something near glee the imminence of “the big one.” But I do think it’s terrifically foolish to react to an outbreak by scaling back, as if, by starving us of a solution, we might also be starving the problem from even beginning. We’ve all become so inured to these outbreaks that we forget that there’s no such thing as a minor virus; there are just those whose progress is halted early, and those that aren’t. We’ve been lucky so far. But we won’t be lucky forever.
So that’s work. Home has been less than great as well. Nathaniel has finally found a job, and just in time—things have been very strained between us. Being in an apartment he hates all day has not been conducive to making new friends, and though, as you know, he’s been trying to keep himself busy, volunteering at the baby’s school and also at a homeless shelter, where he goes every Thursday morning to prepare meals, he feels （as he told me） “useless and meaningless.” I mean, he knew he wasn’t going to find work in his field, but actually accepting that, instead of just saying he accepts that, has taken the better part of two years. So now he’s teaching art to fourth-and fifth-graders at a small, expensive, low-rated school in Brooklyn, one that attracts parents with dim kids and lots of money. Nathaniel has never actually taught before, and the commute is a hassle, but he seems much happier. He’s a last-minute replacement for a woman who was diagnosed with third-stage uterine cancer and quit midterm.
One of the unforeseen consequences of this move—me being at work and satisfied, Nathaniel being at home and resentful—is that he and the baby have constructed a life that feels separate from me and mine. Now, Nathaniel was always the baby’s primary parent anyway, but something seems to have shifted in the past year or so, and I find myself being frequently reminded that they have developed a relationship that in certain ways excludes me, that I am in certain ways ignorant of their daily lives. These reminders are manifested in tiny moments: a shared joke between them at the dinner table which I can’t understand and which they sometimes don’t bother to illuminate （and I, resentful myself, don’t inquire about and feel ashamed about later）; a guilt-driven purchase of a gift for the baby, an electric-purple tin robot, only to learn upon giving it to him that purple is no longer his favorite color, that his favorite color is red, information delivered in an impatient, disappointed tone that wounds me more than it ought to.