Dooms Day Book

“I’m right here, Badri.” Dunworthy took a step toward the bed and then stopped, afraid of upsetting him. “What did you want to tell me?”

“Do you know where he might be then?” Badri said. “Would you give him this note?”

He handed him an imaginary sheet of paper, and Dunworthy realized he must be reliving Tuesday afternoon when he had come to Balliol.

“I have to get back to the net.” He looked at an imaginary digital. “Is the laboratory open?”

“What did you want to talk to Mr. Dunworthy about?” Dunworthy asked. “Was it the slippage?”

“No. Back up! You’re going to drop it. The lid!” He looked straight at Dunworthy, his eyes bright with fever. “What are you waiting for? Go and fetch him.”

The student nurse came in.

“He’s delirious,” Dunworthy said.

She gave Badri a cursory glance and then looked up at the displays. They seemed ominous to Dunworthy, feeding numbers frantically across the screens and zigzagging in three dimensions, but the student nurse didn’t seem particularly concerned. She looked at each of the displays in turn and calmly began adjusting the flow on the drips.

“Let’s lie down, all right?” she said, still without looking at Badri, and, amazingly, he did.

“I thought you’d gone,” he said to her, lying back against the pillow. “Thank goodness you’re here,” he said, and seemed to collapse all over again, though this time there was nowhere to fall.

The student nurse hadn’t noticed. She was still adjusting the drips.

“He’s fainted,” Dunworthy said.

She nodded and began calling reads onto the display. She didn’t so much as glance at Badri, who looked deathly pale under his dark skin.

“Don’t you think you should call a doctor?” Dunworthy said, and the door opened and a tall woman in SPG’s came in.

She didn’t look at Badri either. She read the monitors one by one, and then asked, “Indications of pleural involvement?”

“Cyanosis and chills,” the nurse said.

“What’s he getting?”

“Myxabravine,” she said.

The doctor took a stethoscope down from the wall, untangling the chestpiece from the connecting cord. “Any hemoptysis?”

She shook her head.

“Cold,” Badri said from the bed. Neither of them paid the slightest attention. Badri began to shiver. “Don’t drop it. It was china, wasn’t it?”

“I want fifty cc’s of acqueous penicillin and an ASA pack,” the doctor said. She sat Badri, shivering harder than ever, up in bed and peeled the velcro strips of his paper nightgown open. She pressed the stethoscope’s chestpiece against Badri’s back in what seemed to Dunworthy to be a cruel and unusual punishment.

“Take a deep breath,” the doctor said, her eyes on the display. Badri did, his teeth chattering.

“Minor pleural consolidation lower left,” the doctor said cryptically and moved the chestpiece over a centimeter. “Another.” She moved the chestpiece several more times and then said, “Do we have an ident yet?”

“Myxovirus,” the nurse said, filling a syringe. “Type A.”

“Sequencing?”

“Not yet.” She fit the syringe into the shunt and pushed the plunger down. Somewhere outside a telephone rang.

The doctor velcroed the top of Badri’s nightgown together, lowered him back to the bed again, and flipped the sheet carelessly over his legs.

“Give me a gram stain,” she said, and left. The phone was still ringing.

Dunworthy longed to pull the blanket up over Badri properly, but the student nurse was hooking another drip onto the stanchion. He waited till she had finished with the drip and gone out, and then straightened the sheet and pulled the blanket carefully up over Badri’s shoulders and tucked it in at the side of the bed.

“Is that better?” he said, but Badri had already stopped shivering and gone to sleep. Dunworthy looked at the displays. His temp was already down to 39.2, and the previously frantic lines on the other screens were steady and strong.

“Mr. Dunworthy,” the student nurse’s voice came from somewhere on the wall, “there’s a telephone call for you. It’s a Mr. Finch.”

Dunworthy opened the door. The student nurse, out of her SPG’s, motioned to him to take off his gown. He did, dumping the garments in the large cloth hamper she indicated. “Your spectacles, please,” she said. He handed them to her and she began spritzing disinfectant on them. He picked up the phone, squinting at the screen.

“Mr. Dunworthy, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Finch said. “The most dreadful thing’s happened.”

“What is it?” Dunworthy said. He glanced at his digital. It was ten o’clock. Too early for someone to have come down with the virus if the incubation period was twelve hours. “Is someone ill?”

“No, sir. It’s worse than that. It’s Mrs. Gaddson. She’s in Oxford. She got through the quarantine perimeter somehow.”

“I know. The last train. She made them hold the doors.”

“Yes, well, she called from hospital. She insists on staying at Balliol, and she accused me of not taking proper care of William because I was the one who typed out the tutor assignments, and apparently his tutor’s made him stay up over vac to read Petrarch.”