The dirty bomb story was never allowed to make the newspapers (I suspect there are many stories like this that we never hear about), but the staff knew exactly who I was, what had transpired in the terminal—and also why I was now a guest in their hospital. I felt like an urban legend sprung to life:
You know, that crazy lady who thought this chunk of space junk was a meteorite. She stuck it in her luggage and shut down the world’s seventh largest airport.
I was placed in reverse isolation—yes, into the Bubble—as a precaution. I might have been immunosuppressed; others could easily pass their germs on to me. Dr. Vogel told me that the only real way to tell how severely one has been affected by radiation is by how rapidly the symptoms arrive. My blood tests hadn’t yet come back, but if I were low on white blood cells, I’d be susceptible to opportunistic infections. I’m fortunate that immediate symptoms such as skin burns, nausea and fever hadn’t occurred. I remember during Chernobyl seeing those poor doomed helicopter pilots pouring concrete over the melted reactor. They were dead within days. The thing is, Dr. Vogel doesn’t know what, if anything, is going to happen to me. No one does. Symptoms could take months or years to occur, if ever.
Here I am in yet another form of isolation—a bubble, no less. What is the universe trying to tell me?
Dr. Vogel gave me an English-language medical book, but the section on radiation was too depressing. The symptoms are so similar to those of MS—all that’s different are the rates at which they occur, and an overall sense of never quite knowing for sure if the end is really the end. Being in the Bubble only makes it worse. People look in and smile and wave at me as if I were a puppy or kitten—and the moment they pass, I bet they make a sad face at the person coming the other way:
Poor doomed woman in the Bubble.
Near sunset, William walked into the room outside my bubble, his suit crinkled, a small tomato juice stain on his lapel. “Christ, Lizzie, what the fuck did you do to these people?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Some, not all. You’re in a fucking
bubble.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you sick?”
“Me? No.”
“Why the bubble?”
“Technically, to protect me from you. They won’t let me out until my white blood cell results come back. Pull up a chair.”
William did so. “I drove down to your condo and the building was covered in white plastic. Guys with moon suits were going in and out, like at the end of
ET.
You’re going to have some pretty pissed neighbours when you get home.”
“That’s occurred to me. You look tired.”
“I haven’t slept in twenty-eight hours. I’m used to it.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“So tell me what happened, okay?”
And so I did, leaving out the part about Herr Bayer and Klaus Kertesz.
William said, “That’s our Lizzie—if you’re not finding a transvestite sliced in two, it’s a chunk of plutonium.”
“Not plutonium—I believe it’s enriched uranium.”
He relaxed his chest and let out a whoosh of air. He looked around. “You know what? I’ve bought blood from someone in this hospital before.”
“That’s a coincidence.”
“Some of these Krauts chug along forever. This one woman remembered the invention of cars.”
“Imagine having all those memories.”
“She’s got DNA like a dog’s chew toy. She’ll live to see World War Four.”
“William, when you meet these people and you pay them for their blood, do you ever ask them anything?”
“Medical info only—smoking, drinking, diet—what their work was, how old their relatives are.”
“Do they have anything in common?”
“They all say they don’t worry very much—and weirdly, they tend to not like vegetables. It’s true.”
“I meant, do they ever say how they cope with having all those memories in their head?”
“Never. It’s usually farmers, or people who live in small villages where nothing ever happens. People in cities never reach
105
, let alone
110
.”
“Have you found anything yet that links them all together?”
“Maybe. We think there may be some gene markers, but the big money is going to be in, uh,
other
kinds of cells—but I’m not the one who told you that. We don’t take just blood any more.” He rubbed his eyes, winked and said, “I have to go sleep. How long are you here for?”
“If all goes well, I should be discharged in the morning. I have no clothes—my luggage is being buried as toxic waste—so I have to buy everything new.”
He gave me the number of his hotel and we agreed to meet after my release. As he was walking out of the room, he looked back at me in my bubble. “This is a bit like it was with Jeremy, isn’t it?”
I said that it was.
He said, “See you in the morning, Lizzie.”
* * *
I am determined to fly to Vienna quickly. As William doesn’t know the real purpose of the trip, my determination to go leaves him confused. “Vienna? Just go home, Lizzie. You’ve had enough excitement already.”
“No. I want to see Vienna.” I was a free woman, my white blood cell count was fine and we were in the hotel’s dining room, eating what can only be described as A Salute to Meat—veal stuffed with shrimp, pork stuffed with beef. But meat suddenly seemed different to me; it was flesh, perhaps radioactive flesh. The German word on the menu,
fleisch
, didn’t help matters. I ended up eating a salad.
William was scheduled to fly home the next morning, and was giving me what he thought was good advice. “Vienna’s a big old city filled almost exclusively with senior citizens. Trust me, I know old people, and that’s all the city has—granted, not a
105
in the bunch. Is it the money you’re worried about? Is your trip non-refundable?”
“It’s not the money. I just want to go on principle.” I was fiddling with my hair—or rather, the lack of it. That afternoon, before stocking up on my new
hausfrau
look, I’d impulsively gone into a salon and had it lopped off.
“And why on earth did you cut off your hair? It’s your best feature.”
“I’d rather do it myself than have chemo do it for me.”
“Who said anything about chemo? Your white blood cell count was normal.”
He was entirely correct, but it was easier to use chemo as an excuse instead of saying that I was really sick of being me and that I wanted to be someone else, if only for a little while. I think that’s true of most people who radically cut their hair.
William finished the last veal on his plate. “Just make sure I’m there when Mother sees you for the first time. When are you off, then?”
“Tomorrow. I’m taking the train.”
“Not flying?”
“No.”
“The city of Frankfurt thanks you. Oh—I meant to ask you, do you get to keep your meteorite?”
“Of course not.”
“It would make an interesting lawsuit if you tried to hold on to it.”
“Be realistic, William. They’d simply have me shot.”
We both stirred thick coffees. I was thinking over Dr. Vogel’s prognosis for me. It wasn’t bad, nor was it good. I’m slated to spend the rest of my life wondering whether a bit of fatigue is the start of something sinister, or if a bruise denotes underlying bad news.
I had asked the doctor, “You can’t just do a blood test?”
“Miss Dunn, you could have one blood test a month for the rest of your life—maybe a white blood cell count, most likely—but then what would you do with the results?”
“You tell me.”
“You’d just end up living in a state of hypochondria, which I think is far worse for your body than most diseases out there.”
“So I’m supposed to forget about it?”
“In a word, yes. And no.”
I said good night and goodbye to William from the elevator. This is my journal up to now. I just swallowed a big German sleeping pill. Tomorrow: Vienna.
* * *
Once Jeremy’s elevator started going down, it never came up again. It just fell and fell, into the centre of the earth, and then deeper some. After that first round of flu, he lost much of his mobility. A cold two months later stripped his face of much of its animation.
Sometimes I’d walk into the room and he’d be whispering to himself. I’d move in close to hear his words—always nouns, frightening in the way they formed into lists: …
black cotton … lemon groves … darkness … vinegar … broken bones … milk-white horses … nakedness.
When he stopped making his own jottings, I sometimes wrote down the words. I’d ask him about them, but when he was feeling more himself, he had no idea of their meaning.
I’m trying hard here not to overstate the boundaries of how well I came to know my son. Jeremy was damaged, complex and confused, and there’s only so much one can learn about a person in a fixed amount of time. You can fake many things in life, but twenty years of history isn’t one of them.
I have this theory about life and its shortness. I think that in order for us to take in everything there is for us to learn as human beings on this planet, we’d have to be alive for
750
years. Don’t ask me how I came up with that number; it simply feels about right. As most of us only make it to
70
, we’re left with a deficit of
680
years’ worth of experience. We can be empathetic, we can read every biography ever written, we can keep the TV locked onto the History Channel, we can swab the sores of lepers—but there always remain those annoying
680
years we’ll never know about. I think that’s why we believe in ideas bigger than ourselves: our short lifes-pan shortchanges us of knowledge of the profound.
I ran this by William one night while Jeremy was semi-asleep. He said, “Lizzie, you’re pissed because you think you had a chance to know your kid but you blew it. Get over yourself. Look at me—I’ll never really know my two brats. I know all the usual dad shit, but how far does that take me?”
Jeremy heard this. “Your kids are monsters. You don’t discipline them—they’re barn cats.”
I said, “Jeremy!”
“Liz, my kids
are
monsters. I was one too. So were you.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a monster.”
“Lizzie the burglar.”
This took me aback.
“Burglar?”
“We all knew about you breaking into houses.”
Jeremy lifted his head for that one. “She
what?”
My ears were burning.
“In the summers. Your mother went into houses when people weren’t there, and she’d just sit around.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. She just went into people’s houses and sat in them.”
I asked him, “How long have you
known
about this?”
“The police came around once when you weren’t home. A woman from Social Services said it was just a phase, that we should ignore it. Mother took that advice very seriously.”
Jeremy said, “Wait—the authorities allowed you to break and enter?”
In unison, William and I said, “It was the seventies. Things were different.”
Jeremy looked at me. “So, Mom—did you steal
any
thing?”
“No. That wasn’t the reason.” I confronted William. “Why did nobody ever tell me they knew?”
“My point exactly. There’s much to be said for simply leaving your kids be.”
Whatever they said next passed me right by. I was pink with embarrassment, and felt foolish for having thought I’d gotten away with something.
Wait—
Wait—
It was nothing—just a few of those European ambulances buzzing by outside the hotel window. Actually, my digs here in Vienna consist of a three-room suite—big and expensive, and I don’t care. I just couldn’t face the prospect of a single room, even a deluxe one. Not that I minded my night in prison and in the Bubble; I just don’t want to be alone in one more single room this particular week.
The train floated from Frankfurt to Vienna, and the taxi ride from the station also couldn’t have been more charming: chocolate- and cream-coloured pigeons, precisely coiffed grey hair, cement ornaments like cake frosting, and cookies on doilies looming around every corner. Vienna was never wrecked by war, so, like Rome, it’s old and curlicued. Frankfurt was bombed to smithereens, so everything there is new and rectangular. Everything back home is new and rectangular, but only because it’s the cheapest way of building; how nice to have had a curlicued patch somewhere out here in the world.
It’s also odd to visit a city more by happenstance than by desire. Walking through Vienna’s streets, I think,
Isn’t that pretty. Oh my, look at that.
I see picturesque things, but nothing sticks to my brain, nor do I want things to. I’m detached.
Mostly I just looked in shop windows. Centuries of tweaking have rendered them irresistible, and even a cobbler’s shop had a beautiful colourful display that made me pine for soles in need of releathering. After some hours I returned here to my suite. I was on my bed, holding my shoes, studying their heels, when my phone rang. It was Herr Bayer. I’d left a message on his machine. I’d forgotten to phone from the German hospital to announce my lateness; he must surely consider me a flake.
“Good afternoon, Miss Dunn.”
“Herr Bayer, hello. I’m sorry I didn’t call you before this. I was …
delayed.
”
“I am honoured to have an international crime superstar on the phone with me in my humble office.”
I played it dumb. “Oh?”
“I hear that the city of Frankfurt chased you out of town with stones and buckets of tar.”
He found my story amusing, and my pride was pricked. “How did you find out?”
“This is Europe, Miss Dunn. We share information here. I’m assuming you are okay after prison. What are you doing for dinner?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Then you must please join me.”
We agreed to meet in the downstairs restaurant at eight o’clock, but I wondered if that was too early, too gauche—the Viennese probably start dinner at ten. Screw it. I looked at my short hair in the mirror.
What have I done? Well, long hair didn’t take you far, Lizzie.
I realized I felt like I was primping for a date, and in so doing, alarm bells went off.
Liz Dunn has never been out on a date.
I knew almost nothing about Herr Bayer, and I suspected he was only out to cadge a dinner he could expense.