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NaNo story... part 2!
Sally got to work, turning introspectively over the new data I had fed her - drops in the bucket of what we'd already collected. I leaned against the far wall, arms folded tightly in a defensive posturing. I could feel myself about to nod off, and for the first time in years the niggling yearning to go out back and have a cigarette started hitting me right in the base of my neck, the tip of my tongue. That's never a good sign, when you start getting so tired that you forget how far you've come, reverting to an earlier and more ignorant time. That was just the thing, though... I wanted to be more ignorant. I knew too much, and with only some but not all of the answers, it was going to drive me slowly into a bleak and nihilistic kind of insanity.
Trying to rub wakefulness into my cheeks, I turned toward the door. "Thanks Sal." Her dulcet voice floated out the door after me, bidding me a good night, and I stood outside. The two hallways were like a crossroads, both paths eternal and foreboding. Turn right, and I go back toward the elevator that would plunge me dizzily back into the cold crypt of research and staring and mapping. I'd gotten just shy of halfway through the latest stack of spreadsheets that had been brought in from the field... It was mostly data turned over by hospitals in 4 different countries, all of whom were unaware of the others for the time being, all of whom we were convincing through passive lies that they were a totally unique case. Isolde - one of my research partners from Munich - was the one being the ambassador to the various medical institutions that were involved... she was brilliant at re-acting her horror time and time again as situations grew worse all around. Even the last people down the chain, experiencing the same outbreak as three other cities she'd spoken to, got the same fresh alarm. Better her than me, is what it came down to.
Maybe when Sally finished piecing it all together, it would come out looking like one of the beautiful fractals that she puzzled over, and at the heart of it would be the cure that would magically erase this darkening chapter in medical history from the annals of humanity. That thought made me smile enough to swing my eyes down the other hall. Go left, and take the breezeway from this floor to the parking structure. I hadn't seen my studio in two days... the previous night I'd spent curled up in the backseat under the extra coat I carry in the trunk. It had gotten too late and I didn't feel anywhere close to coherent enough to drive myself home. Today was just different enough to make me think I could probably flex my hands around the wheel and live to tell the tale. Home... a messy apartment, a pissy cat, cold rice pilaf leftovers languishing in the fridge just waiting, waiting for their surly bachelor to come home and devour them with reckless abandon and a bed not quite rumpled enough to suggest that it had enjoyed the company of more than one individual.
It was difficult not to sneer. Here I was feeling sorry for the pittance that was missing in my life, the creature comforts that I could absolutely possess with a little more basic effort on my own part. I was feeling sorry for myself when people who had lives - good lives, bad lives, all kinds of lives - were suffering and dying from a disease we hadn't even had the good sense to give a name to. It was selfish, lacked compassion, as if I'd spent the last month and a half staring at the tribulations of my fellow man as if through a lens of theory. As if this spreading infection were merely a culture, flowering in the safe confines of a petri dish that could be sterilized and erased at a moment's notice.
What kind of man was I becoming?
I wrote a little more since I couldn't go to bed.
Trying to rub wakefulness into my cheeks, I turned toward the door. "Thanks Sal." Her dulcet voice floated out the door after me, bidding me a good night, and I stood outside. The two hallways were like a crossroads, both paths eternal and foreboding. Turn right, and I go back toward the elevator that would plunge me dizzily back into the cold crypt of research and staring and mapping. I'd gotten just shy of halfway through the latest stack of spreadsheets that had been brought in from the field... It was mostly data turned over by hospitals in 4 different countries, all of whom were unaware of the others for the time being, all of whom we were convincing through passive lies that they were a totally unique case. Isolde - one of my research partners from Munich - was the one being the ambassador to the various medical institutions that were involved... she was brilliant at re-acting her horror time and time again as situations grew worse all around. Even the last people down the chain, experiencing the same outbreak as three other cities she'd spoken to, got the same fresh alarm. Better her than me, is what it came down to.
Maybe when Sally finished piecing it all together, it would come out looking like one of the beautiful fractals that she puzzled over, and at the heart of it would be the cure that would magically erase this darkening chapter in medical history from the annals of humanity. That thought made me smile enough to swing my eyes down the other hall. Go left, and take the breezeway from this floor to the parking structure. I hadn't seen my studio in two days... the previous night I'd spent curled up in the backseat under the extra coat I carry in the trunk. It had gotten too late and I didn't feel anywhere close to coherent enough to drive myself home. Today was just different enough to make me think I could probably flex my hands around the wheel and live to tell the tale. Home... a messy apartment, a pissy cat, cold rice pilaf leftovers languishing in the fridge just waiting, waiting for their surly bachelor to come home and devour them with reckless abandon and a bed not quite rumpled enough to suggest that it had enjoyed the company of more than one individual.
It was difficult not to sneer. Here I was feeling sorry for the pittance that was missing in my life, the creature comforts that I could absolutely possess with a little more basic effort on my own part. I was feeling sorry for myself when people who had lives - good lives, bad lives, all kinds of lives - were suffering and dying from a disease we hadn't even had the good sense to give a name to. It was selfish, lacked compassion, as if I'd spent the last month and a half staring at the tribulations of my fellow man as if through a lens of theory. As if this spreading infection were merely a culture, flowering in the safe confines of a petri dish that could be sterilized and erased at a moment's notice.
What kind of man was I becoming?
I wrote a little more since I couldn't go to bed.