The Body Human Read Online Free PDF Page B

countermeasure released an additional set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team, citing fear of reprisals if—”
    A burst of static. The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.
    I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.
     
    By the time I reach the west side of Emerton , the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look. Had looked. My body still doesn’t feel sick.
    Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.
    The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker: TO DR. BENNETT. The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody’s garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a styrofoam plate, a stone crucifix, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of The Prophet . There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seashells, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.
    When I get home, Jack is still asleep.
    I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy Satler . I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from Emerton even in the bad winter weather. About how he’d sit smiling at me through the thick glass in the visitors’ room, his hands with their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her. About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.
    I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.
    He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don’t rinse it. When I return, he’s asleep again.
    I drive to Jackie’s school, to retrieve my daughter. T o gether, we will go to Sylvia Goddard’s—Sylvia James’s—and get Sean. I’ll visit with Sylvia, and shake her hand, and kiss her on the cheek, and touch everything I can. When the kids are safe at home, I’ll visit Ceci and tell her I’ve thought it over and I want to help fight the overuse of antibiotics that’s killing us. I’ll touch her, and anyone else there, and everyone that either Sylvia or Ceci introduces me to, until I get too sick to do that. If I get that sick. Randy said I wouldn’t, not as sick as he is. Of course, Randy has lied to me before. But I have to believe him now, on this.
    I don’t really have any choice. Yet.
     
    A month later, I am on my way to Albany to bring back another dose of the counterbacteria , which the news calls “a reengineered prokaryote.” They’re careful not to call it a germ.
    I listen to the news every hour now, although Jack doesn’t like it. Or anything else I’m doing. I read, and I study, and now I know what prokaryotes are, and b e ta-lactamase, and plasmids. I know how bacteria fight to survive, evolving whatever they need to wipe out the competition and go on producing the next generation. That’s all that matters to bacteria. Survival by their own kind.
    And that’s what Randy Satler meant, too, when he said, “My work is what matters.” Triumph by his own kind. It’s what Ceci believes, too. And Jack.
    We bring in the reengineered prokaryotes in convoys of cars and trucks, because in some other places there’s been trouble. People who don’t understand, people who won’t understand. People whose family got a lot sicker than mine. The violence isn’t over, even though the CDC