A Better World, page 18
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Was it that bad?” Daniella asked.
“It was everything. I don’t have words for all the things.”
“You need a drink,” Rachel said.
“I could have a thousand and I don’t think I’d feel it,” Linda said when she finally let go. “You guys—I think I just decked the Beltane King!”
Their eyes goggled.
“Little you?” Daniella asked.
“Most people have fight or flight. I have fight, then flight.”
“You got away from him?” Rachel asked, equally incredulous.
“I kneed him between the legs and bolted,” she said like it was funny, but it wasn’t funny. It was scary. She wanted very much to cry.
Daniella burst into laughter. “But he never lets anybody go until they cry! Bet he’s fit to be tied! Or having a fit?”
“Holy shit. You’re my hero. He’s had that coming for years.”
“Like kneed him,” Linda said, miming it now, with her knee.
At first, they tittered under stifled grins, all looking away from the other to prevent contagion. But it didn’t subside. Rachel was the first to crack, eyes teary with pent laughter. She brayed. Then all of them were laughing so hard they were holding their stomachs.
“This is my favorite Samhain that’s ever happened,” Rachel said.
“Me too,” Daniella whispered. “I hate that guy so much.”
This brought more laughter of shock and delight.
“I was scared I was the only one,” Linda said. “I thought people thought he was normal!”
More laughing, and leaning on one another, and finally wiping their wet eyes, spent.
It didn’t take long before they found the exit sign and climbed the steps out. The egress opened at an obtuse angle, allowing a panoramic view of the park above, which came suddenly. Russell was out there, along with the rest of their friends. It was bright and it wasn’t scary.
She could see now that, yeah, Josie had been part of that group of teens. She was with them still, her shoulders hunched, seeming not quite a part of the crowd, but on the periphery of a very tight-knit group. She clocked Linda, acknowledged her with a pleading glance that indicated: Please—I know I was wrong—but don’t bust me in front of these people. Linda shook her head with exasperation, extended her hand palm-up to indicate: Go finish your night.
The three women joined their larger crew, who erupted with stories of who’d been scared, who’d laughed, who’d hidden their faces in their hands and begged for it to be over. With Daniella’s prodding, Linda told how she’d escaped Keith. She was tentative when she started, but off their expressions, their interjections (Holy cow! I’d have lost my mind; Don’t mess with Linda—she knows jujitsu! ), she was laughing. It wasn’t a scary story anymore. It was a funny one. They were all laughing all over again, hard as burst hydrants. She couldn’t remember a time she’d been so relieved.
“Do you think Keith’ll be mad? Or Anouk?” Linda asked after they’d all recovered and were heading for the bar.
“It’s the game!” Lloyd reassured. “You played it. No one can hold that against you!”
More happened. There were drinks and food trucks and meeting new people and laughter, so much laughter. They all felt like courageous survivors. And they were, weren’t they? By birth or cunning, they’d each gotten out of something very bad and arrived safely here.
After the maze was cleared of stragglers, John Parson got onstage to say that the night was for honoring the dead residents who’d sacrificed so much to build this town. “May we never forget,” he called, and the crowd responded: “We will never forget.” Then Keith Parson, fully costumed, set a sick caladrius on a chopping block—it looked like the pecked one from outside Anouk’s cottage—and severed its head with an axe.
The act was an apt and violent punctuation to a wild night. Intuitively, she understood that it acknowledged that not everyone was lucky. Not everyone got to live in PV. If she’d tried to explain this to someone back home, she didn’t think they’d have understood.
It was something you had to experience to understand.
November
The jack-o’-lanterns came down and the lights, scary sound effects, and synthetic rubber masks got put away until next year. In their place, the Beautification Society delivered front-door corn husks. Pomegranates got rotated out in favor of hard-boiled eggs, dry beans, and seeds for the late-autumn season. In a neat, aesthetically pleasing way, Hip took over the job of stocking the altar.
Dayworkers raked the wild red piles of leaves at the edges of houses, transporting them to the northern farm as compost. By the end of the first week of November, a light frost webbed the windows and browning lawns. Days got shorter. Winter coats appeared.
Russell’s delayed court case arrived. With his new data, he testified in Omnium’s defense and won, much to everyone’s relief. Then he started on a new case, and they understood that this would continue: there would always be cases to try, information to retrieve despite difficult obstacles, victories to grasp. His performance would never stop being judged. But at least now, they’d passed the first and most difficult gauntlet: finding their side hustle and learning how to navigate the people of this town.
Josie’s team stayed in third place, but her footwork improved and Coach Farah moved her to left forward, where she belonged. She still wasn’t happy Josie. Linda didn’t know how to fix that. Then again, maybe it wasn’t something that could be fixed. Sometimes you’re not happy. Some years you’re with the wrong people until you find the right ones.
Hip spent most of his time with Cathy. He’d supported and taken on her cause: lobbying for golden tickets for everyone born into PV. “It’s not right that Cathy doesn’t feel safe in her own home,” he told Linda one afternoon. “If you’re born here, you should have the right to stay here forever.”
“What about outsiders, like us?”
He nodded at her, like this was something he’d already considered. “It’s smart for us to be patient. We have to work on one issue at a time. I’m trying not to be selfish. Selfish people aren’t what this community needs. If we ask for golden tickets early, it’ll just alienate everybody and remind them we’re outsiders.”
“Without a golden ticket, do you feel safe?” Linda asked.
Hip looked at her with surprise. “Of course! I live here!”
* * *
Mid-November, Linda had some time on her hands and stayed late after her shift at the PV Hospital. Thinking of Gal, but still unready to visit her, she researched the cancer Gal had claimed both her children were afflicted with: idiopathic leukemia.
There wasn’t any record of the disease in the main BetterWorld search engine, but that didn’t mean much. Every private corporation had its own engine, as did every country, and these didn’t typically assimilate data from outside sources. She tried the medical school consortium but her Downstate password had expired. She tried the Bed-Stuy Children’s Clinic’s files and couldn’t connect.
She did find an article in the Journal of Pediatric Oncology published a year earlier, in which the disease was considered difficult to treat because diagnosis took so long. Etiology was unclear. It was higher in the presence of toxic exposure. The Review section highlighted a geographic information systems analysis that pinpointed hot spots all over the globe. These hot spots tended to center in poor, rural communities. The disease itself was strange, affecting monocytes, platelets, and red blood cells alike. Several immunotherapy drugs were recommended, but not Zovolotecan—the chemotherapeutic agent Linda had seen on Gal’s table the night of the fire.
Though most of the articles were locked, physicians had written open letters in several issues of the Journal of Pediatric Oncology, vouching for the increased presence of idiopathic leukemia and the lack of standard treatment. Doctors all over were frustrated, trying to find a cause or consistent pathology. Some claimed that idiopathic anemia wasn’t a single disease, but a term for a host of illnesses. These included leukemias and complex autoimmune diseases like aplastic anemia. Clinical trials were taking place at the Cleveland Clinic and at the NIH Clinical Center. Similar trials were also happening in Cork, Ireland, and Beijing, China, though because of global data-sharing restrictions, their methods were unknown.
She wrote a note to Chernin, asking whether PV had sanctioned Zovolotecan’s use for idiopathic leukemia, and what insights he had on the drug’s efficacy. Then she wrote to her old boss, Fielding: What do you know about this disease? Is Zovolotecan a common treatment, and do you have any idea what causes it?
Then she read the report on Carlos’s blood panel, which had come back inconclusive. The PV oncologist who’d signed it suggested more tests. For the third time in as many weeks, she called the number Danny Morales had written on the intake form and left a message: Please come back. This isn’t something that can wait.
* * *
That night, they went to the talk hosted by the Plymouth Valley Chamber of Commerce. Most residents didn’t bother attending, but as newcomers Linda and Russell found the talks helpful.
Only about thirty people were present. Sally Claus, the border guard, and Henry Pratt, the chief of police, opened with a Samhain debriefing. Then the procedures for reserving vacation spots, school pickup, sending mail, and the like were discussed. Volunteers with at least five years of PV residency were wanted for the Thanksgiving and Winter Festivals. The main PV access road was now going to be guarded by extra police, as unhoused dayworkers had been sneaking into the Labyrinth and setting up camps instead of going home at night. In addition, the stop sign on Maple Street had been defaced on Samhain night. They had identifying footage, but preferred the culprit surrender first. Punishment would be community service. Finally, they announced that two babies had been born this month, both healthy girls and welcome additions to Plymouth Valley.
* * *
After her shift at PV Hospital the following week, Linda stayed late again. Chernin never replied to her question, but Fielding did:
Hi, Linda!
So good to hear from you. Have you picked up golf? I hope not! Anyway, life here is deplorable and your patients miss you. I do, too.
Regarding idiopathic leukemia, I’ve never heard of it. It sounds more like a legal term than a medical one. Research institutes and hospitals have lately lost access to Med-Nex, which is where I’d be able to find your answers for you. But like my old friend Joseph Mitchell, I had some insomnia the other night and did some extra research. There was a lawsuit pending against BetterWorld by the European Chemicals Agency for its role in causing Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia as a result of Omnium degradation. In labs, the reaction between GREEN and Omnium is clean. But when GREEN attaches to reactive substrates like chlorine, it could potentially release an unstable benzene ring and PERC in the waste (they call it sludge?!). If you remember your organic chemistry, those can be highly oncogenic. I’d hoped to find more about this condition internationally, given Omnium’s mostly made and broken back down in Asia, but those databases are locked down. What I did find is that there was also a case against BetterWorld and the government of the Republic of Ireland, likewise claiming the Omnium mill there caused blood diseases and birth defects. It was dropped a few years ago, with the republic receiving north of three trillion dollars in damages.
Zovolotecan—As you know, it’s a chemotherapeutic agent, and could make sense for treatment of either a leukemia or an aplastic anemia, though it’s a very old drug. The new class is much better and has less side effects. Whenever a young patient has an aggressive disease like this, marrow transplants and radiation are also indicated.
Would be great if we could get the consortium of universities back up and running. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it’s very convenient none of us can talk to each other, but these giant corporations mine every bit of data we surrender. For all we know idiopathic leukemia isn’t rare at all.
As for me, I’m fine. I’m down to working only two days a week, as I get tired. I enjoyed doing this sleuthing for you, as lately my mind has not been as sharp as I’d like and this mystery acted as a whetstone. In that light, take my findings with a tablespoon of salt. I have become forgetful, and this letter took me longer than it should have to write. I hope we meet again, Linda Farmer-Bowen. I have always found you to be an impressive person.
Anyway, consider the above the ravings of an under-slept old friend who misses you quite a bit.
Sincerely,
Carole Fielding, MD, MPH
Linda read the letter more than once. The first time, she couldn’t focus. Fielding had been good to her. Like a parent, in many ways. It was hard to imagine the woman in a sickbed. In the entire time Linda’d known her, she’d taken every lunch break standing up.
What should she do? Should she fly out? Would she be allowed to leave PV for such a reason? Fielding had a daughter who lived with her. She was cared for. And Linda’d seen plenty of death. She didn’t think she could handle losing one more person she loved. Still, she shot off an email to Leticia, the receptionist: Let me know when things are going south with Doc Fielding. Please.
Then she closed those feelings away. Moved on.
She looked up idiopathic leukemia again but found no cases in PV’s system. She looked up leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Waldenstrom’s. Those weren’t present, either. How was it possible that not a single resident in any of BetterWorld’s eighteen company towns had been diagnosed with blood cancer? She printed Fielding’s email and handed it to Russell that night.
“Does this make any sense to you?”
He spent about ten minutes reading it over, which was a long time for Russell. As he read, he paled, eyes blinking.
“What do you think?”
“There’s no way Omnium makes people sick. I like Fielding, but she was always a conspiracy theorist. And there’s no PERC. Tetrachloroethene was outlawed in the United Colonies decades ago.”
“I know,” Linda said. “And I know neither Omnium nor GREEN has those chemical components. But maybe she’s right. Maybe in the presence of chlorine, like you might find in a landfill, something different happens.”
“Those disposal sites are clean,” he said, handing the paper back. “And we definitely paid off Ireland, but that’s because their standards on causality are so different. You don’t have to prove anything. It wasn’t worth the court fight. Easier to pay them off. You know she’s sick, Linda. Stage four lung cancer. I hate to say this, but that tumor might have traveled to her brain.”
Linda looked down. Tears came.
“Oh, honey,” Russell said. He hugged her.
Her voice came out muffled. “I know. The brain is usually the first place it travels. I hope that isn’t what this is. But then again, I do hope. Because either way, this is a very upsetting letter.”
“Tell you what. Let me have a look. I’m already researching idiopathic leukemia for you. I can poke around a little on this biochemistry stuff, too.”
“Thanks,” she said. “And sorry to be laying this at your feet.”
“Don’t be sorry. We’ll both feel better once we have the numbers. Then you can tell Fielding to receive a kick in the balls from me.”
CHAPTER 5: Plymouth Valley Case Study: Hollow
The events leading up to the catastrophic disaster in Plymouth Valley are indicative of a culture in decline. Imagine the Mayans upon year thirty of drought. Their people were starving in the streets, and their science had no explanation for it. They turned to their gods. We can see this throughout the mini ice age when Rome and the Incas finally collapsed. We can also see it toward the mid-to-late twenty-first century.
What’s interesting about the Plymouth Valley Hollow movement is that its birth was contemporaneous with like movements throughout company towns across the globe. These started as pseudoscientific ideological clubs—a source of bonding and civic pride and an occasional tax dodge. Over time, religious elements burgeoned.
—From THE FALL OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, by Jin Hyun, Seoul National University Press, 2093.
Giving Thanks
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Linda’s front bell rang. She opened it to a young, pimpled man in a PV police uniform. He was familiar. Maybe she’d seen him at the Samhain festival, or perhaps he’d spoken at the Chamber of Commerce meeting.
“Mrs. Farmer-Bowen?” he asked. His voice was deep for someone so young.
“Hi! Do I know you?”
“Cyrus Galani. Most people do. I grew up here, so. But yes, we did meet a few months back.”
“When was that?” she asked, leaning into the doorway. “I know you, but I can’t place it.”
“You needed a ride,” he said. “You were feeling poorly.”
“The night I was with Gal Parker! That was you!”
“Awful night,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. She didn’t often get to talk about Gal Parker. Though this town could be incredibly gossipy, Gal and her kids were off limits. It was as if they found the memory of the whole event too painful to contemplate. Even blunt Rachel had closed the lid on all conversation relating to Gal. Woman, you gotta shut up about this. It’s too sad. I can’t take it had been her exact words.
“Can I ask you a question about that night?” Linda asked.
“Of course.”
“Did you have any idea she might start that fire?”
“Absolutely not,” he said with wide-eyed sincerity.
“Me neither,” Linda said. “I feel a little dumb every time I remember that car ride. That whole night.”
Cyrus said nothing, probably because he was a wet-behind-the-ears kid unequipped to handle a middle-aged woman’s emotions. Linda laughed at herself. “Can I get you something? Tea? My housekeeper made a sourdough. I’d take credit but who’d believe me? They’re impossible to get right.”
