Strange Contagion by Lee Daniel Kravetz

Author:Lee Daniel Kravetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Considering the Piggyback Treatment

Autumn in New York brings with it a cooling off of spirit that moves in with the sweep of crispness in the air. The bank of flags across the front of the United Nations Headquarters casts a shadow across the sidewalk of First Avenue as I pass underneath it. Across the street, I move through a heavy glass door and past a United Nations Plaza security station. Neither X-ray machine nor metal detector is strong enough to spot the kind of social contagions I’m after. No amount of security guards, with all the firepower of a small army, possesses the means to stop them, either.

A few days ago I was still at home. The television was switched to the evening news. It featured a clip of the Endeavour’s flyover. The camera lens had managed to capture a perspective from a spectacular vantage point that showed the spacecraft in crisp detail, rendering in me a sense that perhaps we hadn’t been there at all, or had seen an entirely different event transpire with our own eyes. Watching it on television, that bottomless thrill bloomed in my chest all over again. Such is the power of media, at once capable of revealing and enhancing reality. Watching the space shuttle move across the screen, it occurred to me that if we can catch social contagions like eating disorders and somatic symptoms of hysteria, then we might also use the medium of television to introduce a specific kind of cure. We could allow a foolproof remedy to piggyback on the digitalized, high-definition images just as the Endeavour rode on the back of the 747.

To test this theory, today I find myself back in Manhattan, now standing face-to-face with an armed guard who’s examining my identification in his big hand with a thoroughness that’s a bit excessive. He asks me what exactly brings me here to UN Plaza. I consider telling him that I have reason to believe that the next piece of an impossible puzzle is located on the fifth floor of this building. Or I can tell him that I’ve come 4,000 miles to ask a man named Sean Southey about how to remedy a strange contagion he’s never heard of before.

Instead, I tell him I’m here visiting an organization called PCI Media Impact. The security guard turns my license under a pocket blue light, then looks at me and hands it back with no expression. After checking my name against a roster on the computer, he motions me through a metal detector and into an elevator. He pushes the button for my floor and slips back into the lobby as the doors slide shut. They don’t mess around here. I can understand that; I’m not here to mess around, either.

The organization I’m looking for is at the end of a short hallway. I step into a suite full of editing booths and producers toiling quietly at computers. A young guy with short hair and a dark beard closest to the entrance looks up at me, not nearly as skeptical as the lobby guard.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.