Nathaniel has worked for this family for more than a year, but we speak about them very little. Mr. Holson, who brokers corporate mergers, spends most of his time in the Gulf. Mrs. Holson was a corporate lawyer but quit to stay home with her sons when they were diagnosed.
The Holsons live in a beautiful brownstone, two hundred years or more old, renovated with money and taste; the steps leading to the front door had been rebuilt so that the landing could be extended and the decontamination pod could be sealed within a small stone chamber of its own, as if it had always been there—once it hissed open, so too did the front door, which was painted a glossy black. Inside, the house was dim, the blinds were all drawn, and the floors were painted the same shiny dark as the door. A woman—white, small, black-haired—approached me. She took my mask and handed it to a maid, and we bowed; she gave me a pair of latex gloves to wear. “Dr. Griffith,” she said, “I’m Frances Holson. He’s come around, but I thought I should call you anyway, have you take him home.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I followed her up the staircase, where she led me to what was clearly a spare bedroom, where Nathaniel was lying on the bed. He smiled when he saw me.
“Don’t sit up,” I said, but he already was. “What happened, Natey?”
He said he’d just had a head rush, maybe because he hadn’t eaten today, but I knew it was because he was exhausted, though I made a show of putting my hand on his forehead, feeling for fever, and then looking into his mouth and eyes for spots.
“Let’s go home,” I told him. “I have the car.”
I expected him to argue, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “I just want to say goodbye to the boys first.”
We walked across the landing and toward a room at the end of the hall. The door was ajar, but he tapped on it, lightly, before we entered.
Inside, two boys were sitting at a child-size table, assembling a puzzle. I knew they were seven, but they looked four. I had read the research about juvenile survivors, and these children were in some ways instantly recognizable to me: They both wore tinted glasses, even in this low light, to protect their eyes, and they were both very pale, their limbs soft and thin, their rib cages blocky and wide, their cheeks and hands pitted with scars. They had both regrown their hair, but it was thin and fine, like an infant’s, and the drugs that helped generate hair growth were also responsible for the fuzz of fur that grew across their chins and foreheads, and along the sides and backs of their necks. Each of them had a slim tracheal tube that attached to a small ventilator pack that clipped to his waistband.
Nathaniel introduced them as Ezra and Hiram, and they waved at me with their small, limp, salamander-like hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told them, and although I knew it already, I could tell from his tone that he liked these boys, that he cared about them.
“What’s wrong, Nathaniel?” asked one of them, Ezra or Hiram, in a tiny, breathy voice, and Nathaniel stroked the boy’s head, his hair lifting and floating from the static caused by Nathaniel’s gloves. “I’m just feeling a little tired,” he said.
“Do you have the sickness?” the other one asked, and Nathaniel winced, just a bit, before smiling at him. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise.”
Downstairs, Frances was waiting, and she handed us our masks, made me promise to take care of Nathaniel. “I will,” I said, and she nodded. She was pretty, but between her eyes there were two deep grooves; I wondered if she had always had them, or if she had acquired them over the past four years.
Back at our apartment, I put Nathaniel to bed and texted David to warn him to be quiet and let his father sleep, and then I went to the lab. On my way there, I thought about David, about how lucky we were that he was safe, safe and healthy. Protect him, I would say to myself, unclear whom I was addressing, as I walked to work, or washed the dishes, or showered. Protect him, protect him. Protect my son. It was irrational. But it had worked so far.
Later, while I was eating dinner at my desk, I thought about the two boys, Ezra and Hiram. It was like something out of a fairy tale: the quiet house with its gentle light, Frances Holson and Nathaniel the parents, me the skulking guest, and those elfin creatures—half human and half pharmaceuticals—whose realm it was. One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life. I didn’t administer therapies to those infected by NiVid-50; I didn’t have a role in developing the drugs. I didn’t think about what the survivors’ lives might be like—that wasn’t my job. But in the past few years, now that the disease has been contained, I find myself confronted with the facts of their lives almost daily. Some, like the teacher at David’s school, who was already an adult, and probably healthy, when she contracted the illness, have been able to return to a version of their lives before.
But those boys will never have a normal life. They will never be able to go outside; they will never be able to be touched by the bare hands of anyone but their mother. It’s a life; it’s their life. They’re too young to remember anything else. Though maybe the people I was pitying wasn’t them but their parents—their worried mother, their absent father. What must it have been like, to watch your children come so close to death and then, in saving them, realize that you’ve transported them to a place that you can leave but they never can? Not death, not life, but existence, their entire world in one house, your hopes of everything they’d be and see and experience buried in the backyard, never to be unearthed. How could you encourage them to dream of anything else? How could you live with the sorrow and guilt that you had condemned them to a life stripped of all that’s pleasurable: movement; touch; the sun on your face? How could you live at all?
With love, Charles
August 7, 2055
Dear P, please forgive this very rushed response, but I’m racing here （for obvious reasons）。 All I can say is that it certainly seems to be the case. I read the same report you did, but I also got another, this one from a colleague, and I can’t interpret the findings any other way. There’s a multi-institute team that leaves for Manila, and from there to Boracay, tomorrow. I was asked if I could go, because this new one looks very similar to the ’50 strain. But I can’t—things are so bad with David now that I just can’t do it. Not going feels like a dereliction of duty, but leaving would as well.
The only question now is what, if anything, can be done in terms of containment. I fear it’s not going to be much. I’ll keep you posted on whatever I hear, and consider this information—such as it is—not for attribution.
Love, C.
Hi dear P, October 11, 2055
This morning I had my first MuFIDRT meeting. What does MuFIDRT stand for? I’m so glad you asked. It means: Multi-Field Infectious Disease Response Team. MuFIDRT. Written out, it looks like it might be either a Victorian-era simulacrum of a woman’s genitals or a science-fiction villain’s lair. It’s pronounced Moofid-RT, if that helps, and it was apparently the best acronym a group of civil servants could come up with. （No offense.）