Fever by Janet Gilsdorf

Author:Janet Gilsdorf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

1984 MICHIGAN

Sid couldn’t make herself get out of bed. Yes, she had arrived home from Amsterdam after midnight and then bounced around her apartment for an hour before settling down. Yes, she’d then fidgeted nonstop before finally falling asleep sometime after four in the morning. Yes, she was tired. But mostly she didn’t want to go to the lab.

That had never happened before. Every other morning, eager for an early start on the day’s work, she had bolted out of bed before the alarm clock rang. But that morning, after hitting the snooze button the third time, she buried her head under her pillow to avoid the sunshine that streamed like molten crystal through her window. Those beams of light tried to nudge her awake, to prod her to lower her feet to the floor and hoist herself off the mattress, and she wanted none of it. Between the alarms, an extended, fractured dream—one of those “I-can’t-move-my-legs-to-run-from-the-monster” nightmares—had scrolled through her restless mind. It had no plot. Rather, the dream was a series of ominous dinging bells, and orange and green blinking lights, and overwhelming flashes of badness: a naked sprint down a crowded street; a lost wallet; a puppy she’d forgotten to feed for a week; another child’s funeral in Promissão.

Finally, her full bladder drove her to the bathroom. Her head throbbed. Her stomach roiled. At first, she thought she’d caught a virus. But she had no cough nor fever, no sore throat nor nausea, just a fluttery belly and aches from nose to toes. Mostly she felt depleted, engulfed in the free-floating foreboding that wrings life’s sap from a person.

She tried to take charge of whatever had possessed her. She asked questions of herself and then tried to answer them. Why are you like this? Don’t know. Is this good for you? No. What do you want to do rather than go to the lab? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She ran warm water into the bathtub, dumped in a splash of bath oil, and, when it was half full, climbed in. It felt good to lean her head against the back wall and let the silky liquid wash over her tingling skin and massage her crampy muscles.

The GHA fellow’s stinging remarks lurked along the edges of her mind like vicious nettles. Should she cave to his comments and acknowledge that sending the BPF strain to a reference laboratory was a good idea? Maybe. Or should she ignore his comments and consider them nonsense? Also a maybe. The strain came from Brazil, so a US public health agency wouldn’t touch it. She was certain the Brazil National Health Department wouldn’t do as well as she would at identifying the bacteria.

What was wrong with her? She’d been disappointed before and had put it behind her. Ditto for disillusionment. She’d dodged embarrassing situations at all costs but had suffered through a few. Why was this one, the admonishment from the GHA guy, so awful? She swirled the water with her feet, dunked her head until she was completely submerged.

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