I was never heroic. The heroes are the people who stayed and fought for freedom as hard as they fought the flu. I ran.

I’m still running.

Nor was my first escape as exciting as reports would have it. How to convey the thrills of unending smelly claustrophobia?

We couldn’t leave the car. Anna was sick and we were on the run in Upstate New York, surrounded by a government gone mad on the limitless power it drew from its failures.

Day after day, I gorged on granola and dried fruit, peeing into rice milk containers like an environmentalist trucker, grabbing naps in swamps and post-industrial wastelands while she kept watch. I was a Boy Scout on the run, all my pandemic prep reduced to bleary panic.

I had tried so hard to be a good New Yorker, to body surf this crashing wave of natural history, and then to rise up through the human chaos that ensued. To triumph, American-style.

I wound up as another black-and-white movie gangster squinting into the early light for patrol cars, hallucinating mugs of fresh coffee and starting to mutter prayers I thought I’d forgotten.

You should know that the final blog entries were a fraud. I used my posts to confuse the Feds as to our whereabouts. I apologize (yet again) to my loyal readers for using you, but the stakes were sharp and high. I’m not really sorry, but I apologize. I meant well.

A lot of people started following the chase online. Other bloggers discussed it. We were unofficial news. A support committee sprang up in the Netherlands.

Then, nothing: Niets.

I never intended to leave everyone hanging. I endangered some wonderful friends routing two more entries through a maze of emails and bulletin boards to be posted by someone who was living in a country immune to Washington’s charms. The posts would have reassured my readers that we had made it to wherever we were going.

The Feds didn’t want to read that, let alone see you reading it. They shut down my blog.

Naming No Names

Here, then, is an expurgated version of how we flew the coop. I have to skip over details that might give away the identities and methods of folks who helped us. The Feds remain hungry to know them. In trying to negotiate my return to the USA, I have refused to implicate anyone. I’d rather spend the rest of my years underground—die in obscurity as the world’s longest running flugitive—than betray those who helped. Some barely knew us.

Okay: Back in my apartment, with Anna consigned to die in Brandeis High School, I spent hours planning and assembling the elements of our flight. These included what I hoped was genuine Relenza; phony identification; a laptop; an old car (it was no gas guzzler, another lie); road maps; and backup supplies in case the bungalow was inhospitable.

Not least, I needed a gutsy accomplice to spirit us away from the high school in a borrowed car with artfully obscured plates. We drove directly upstate in a second car I’d obtained while that noble soul piggybacked on someone else’s friend’s neighbor’s wireless account to post the decoy blog item about us resting overnight in New York.

I owe that brave spirit two lives every day. I’ve determined that he was locked up for helping us, and that he died of H5N1 in jail a month later. So I can thank ‘Bruno,’ the finest punk who ever lived and drummed and died struggling for a better world. He’d have made a great brother. Briefly, he did.

When our respite at the bungalow ended, I drove hundreds of miles out of our way while Anna relapsed. I accessed a stranger’s wireless modem near the towers of Three Mile Island in South Central Pennsylvania to post the account of our latest flight. I wanted the Feds to think we were chasing the sun—and Vitamin D—southward, toward my home state of Missouri, or perhaps Mexico.

Around now I wish to apologize to anyone whose door may have gotten kicked in as a result of one of the wireless-tapping exploits involved in my escape. I’m truly sorry. If they ever legalize me, I’ll honor bills for the repairs.

A day later, Anna was still weak. The car was stuffy with perspiration amid the high heat I needed to maintain for her. It was tough for me to stay alert on the back roads, and we had a long way to go to a place the Feds would expect me to shun because of my libertarian leanings: Canada. I’d begun to look into fleeing northward as soon as I emerged from that glowing box at DHS. To paraphrase Dylan, I didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing out of DC.

Exhausted and impatient, I took a chance and veered onto the New York State Thruway, America’s longest interstate highway. I made great time for a while. Anna and I spoke eagerly about our prospects up north; being with her made me feel that anything was possible, even something good. When she fell asleep, I was happy to see her resting like a kid—tired of the road, hoping we’d be there when she woke up.

Instead I woke up in the worst way—with a siren in my ears, flashing lights in my mirror, and a wheel in my hands. I wasn’t so much speeding as drifting drowsily from lane to lane ahead of a state trooper who wanted to shock some respect into me.

CytoKind Trooper

Anna didn’t wake up as I pulled over, a good thing. I needed to play the old bloody blanket trick, and her lolling head, greasy hair, and shiny chin helped it look convincing. I slipped a soiled paper mask onto my face. I’d kept it under my chin for fill-ups.

I handed a tall, gray-haired cop my forged papers and humbly apologized for having nodded off at the wheel. I explained with tired desperation and cottony tongue that my wife was sick with flu. I was taking her to a hospital I’d heard was treating folks. I hoped he wouldn’t ask where such a place might be, that he’d withdraw in horror and leave us to our fates. We must have smelled like death on wheels.

The officer stunned me with a compassionate look and the insistence that we’d be welcome at a hospital less than 15 miles away. He offered to call for a car, but I pleaded to be allowed to drive there, keep our things intact. He pulled out a cell phone and notified the hospital we’d be arriving, wrote the directions for me. Then he followed us to the toll turnoff to make sure I was capable of driving safely. We exchanged waves as I turned to exit. The last American cop I met was the best—no kind of storm trooper. (I hoped he’d never find out who we were, though I doubt he’d mind so much now.)

I feared he’d report us when we failed to show up at the hospital. Soon I was sneaking into farmyards to look for active license plates I could attach to our car. I snatched some from a sedan mounted on blocks. Twenty-four hours later, Anna was rebounding and we were hiding with people I’d heard could smuggle us over the border.

That night, I arranged for a friend to post something via a wireless hit somewhere around Missouri. The next day’s entry was similarly jacked up nearby, maybe in Arkansas.

The last post was a farewell tip of the mask to the DHS whose FEMA did so little to save New Orleans. I had reckoned back in New York that they’d get a kick from a doomed whimper out of the Crescent City.

I remember hearing radio announcements saying that certain people under 40 could start turning up at selected hospitals for vaccination, so long as they had proper ID. No illegal immigrants or dissidents on the run. It was like being banned from celebrating Thanksgiving.

I wish I could explain how we got into Canada, where everyone from everywhere had been vaccinated by then. Our immigration combined the creative and the traditional, was even a little funny. It took a while. I can say that Gene Clark’s Strength Of Strings—a rolling throbbing soaring heartbeat of a song—filled my brain at the key crossing juncture as I overheard a wary Canadian voice turn pleasant and inviting:

In my life the piano sings

Brings me words that are not the strength of strings

Fiery rain and rubies cooling sun

Now I see that my world has only begun

We wound up settling in a hillside community, a semi-abandoned mining town that could use more Vitamin D. Land was bountiful. The people were kind and tolerant. I wound up designing stuff in the DIY mode they favor.

I pretended I was gleaning know-how off the web. It was fascinating having to reinvent the wheel, justify things I’d learned in architecture school. I built a few structures, even a boat. I helped rig water recycling schemes and I customized energy systems to liberate folks from the grid.

Familiarity Breeds Content

When you’re living underground, you avoid questions. Some you answer before people can pose them. Others you gradually finesse by turning yourself into local furniture. Your neighbors whisper comfortable myths about your past. Over time you want to be like that ‘new’ chair Aunt Mabel gave someone long ago.

Canadians made it easy for us. They’re too polite to pry. They respect strangers till you give them reason not to. It still hurts that I lied to them. I passed on some promising friendships.

To avoid generating attention, I had to learn not to argue, never to express controversial opinions. I closed sentences with that self-deprecating Canadian eh?

Anna and I developed the gift of debating in whispers, or with eyebrow code when silence was essential. She always preferred telepathic discourse anyway. Anna never lost her taste for teasing me with meaningful flashes from her gray eyes until I was too weak to resist her sweet implacable wisdom.

Canada was very good to us. I guess it civilized me, made me a social libertarian.

We didn’t go anywhere the next flu season. We lay low in honor of Dr. Hope-Simpson, trying not to spread whatever we harbored. You all know better than I how fearsome Round Three was. I know a lot of Round One survivors got reinfected. I told you viruses were tricky.

I expect to see more pandemics in my lifetime. There are currently circulating five bird flu strains that could cross over and kick society to pieces all over again. Forget the smug assurances that a big pandemic can occur only once per century: We haven’t stopped culturing killer microbes in our industrial food chain.

I’m surprised that the authorities still don’t know how influenza spreads among people. No one cares. That’s probably just as well: Were Hope-Simpson more respected, man would try to thwart the natural process of species immunization. I envision humans with immunity being hunted down and liquidated by those who lack it, a biological nightmare Ayn Rand could have entertained.

Two years ago, Anna and I nearly replaced one of the world’s billion flu victims. We had well-practiced and capable help, but our baby’s birth went wrong. Losing a second daughter hurt Anna immeasurably more than it hurt me. What’s more than infinity?

American Exposé

Then the unauthorized publication of my blog forced us to separate. I had described Anna too well. I haven’t seen her eyes since we left Canada by separate means. There were no warrants out for her.

I long for Anna. There’s no way for us to communicate safely, but I know she misses me, too.

The City of New York and the US Government demand I admit to assaulting an officer of the law, possessing weapons and drugs, using false documents, and committing a host of lesser offenses. I herewith throw the book back at them. You’re reading it.

I didn’t harm anyone. I helped people. My transgressions were verbal and they were aimed at a state that failed its citizens in a thousand ways. My ‘crimes’ have outlived the Great Pandemic.

I will not go to prison or see my reputation blackened. I want to clear my name.

I don’t hate the people who hound me. The DHS workers and fellow apparatchiks are merely doing their jobs, dreaming of pensions and college for the kids. Nice folks, following orders. We’ve all heard that before. I want them to stop.

I want Round Two with Anna. I yearn to stroll Manhattan with her. No masks or gloves or goggles. We’d rediscover one another in magnificent combustion. I’d taste her resolve, consume her anew. I’d learn to laugh again.

Meanwhile I’m trapped in cyberspace like that polar bear you all fussed over last year as he drifted slowly to his death on that shrinking ice floe. Please don’t let that happen to me.

Don’t count Blogula out!

Stay well & free.

(Access to the site was disabled a week later.)

(Next: American Fever’s exciting Afterword)

SIGNAL HILL (Kate MacDonald)

I can barely keep my eyes open, but I can’t trust a motel not to report us. I don’t feel secure enough to pull over for coffee. The only reliable way to wake up is for me to spot a police car—they charge my heart like a cattle prod.

I think of all the emails and photos and movies that pass through me as I drive. They talk to me.

ATLAS AIN'T HALLIBURTON, OR XE SERVICES—OR ANY 'SECURITY CONTRACTOR'And I picture John Galt & the Gang in Atlas Shrugged, fearlessly fending off pointy-headed bureaucrats, while I contemplate all the corporations that are trying to track me for the government. (Nothing personal, of course.)

I dread to think what Ayn Rand would have thought of Halliburton—or any of the companies that foster and feed off big government. (Sure, she’d rejoice in the primacy of Steve Jobs, but he’s a freak.)

I realize now that big bureaucracies of any kind are the problem. A gigantic organizational threshing machine is a menace, whether it’s public or private. They all spy on us, despise us, atomize us.

What would Ayn Rand say today about her failure? The business world is run by men she would have despised. Their enterprises feed off a state whose overseers take orders from CEOs. It’s a merger made in hell, corporatism without Hitler or Mussolini.

Ayn Rand: Used & Abused

Rand would see that her life’s work has been abused, that she’s become a seductive fig leaf for corporatism. Ayn Rand’s mystique, born of her hunger to escape and counter Russian Leninism, has become the face of a glorious, obsessive entrepreneurialism that drives our modern American dream. It’s a fraud: We fantasize about limitless freedom as we descend into the depressing reality of an authoritarianism on which both government and ‘free enterprise’ seem to agree.

Libertarians have been hoodwinked by Rand’s entrepreneurial romanticism into accepting a tsunami of armed corporatism that is drowning us in surveillance and control.

It’s worse than any virus. It would break Rand’s passionate heart. Wake up!

So I sing to myself, almost alone, from With Tomorrow. I had to make up most of Clark’s words. It made sense at the time.

The sun gets bigger and life gets smaller.

I just passed some big grinning pumpkins. I think I’m late, but: Happy Halloween, friends.

Trouble at home
Travel the way, you say:
“The road don’t like me.”
Travel away,
Travel it all away:
“The road’s gonna end on me.”

YOU ARE HERE (Kate MacDonald)When you’re on the run, your soul is singed, tender, needy. Like it’s on fire.

Like a burning tire.

It seems to me that in ordinary life, there are plenty of times when you begin to feel your spirit acutely. But there are other souls all around, bumping into yours, deadening it.

When you find yourself alone—exposed to the dangerous whims of man and nature—your spirit breaks out of the past. You need love more nakedly than you ever did.

The old substitutes could never cut it. Attention, admiration, and envy won’t satisfy. Lust is empty. The ways love always scared you back into your hole—all the botched expectations and fear of disappointing—don’t matter at all.

I would kill to save Anna. Post it on my tomb if it comes to that.

Add this from Gene while we’re at it: “If You're Gone then there is nothing that remains.”

Vitamin D or Bust? Nothing else has worked.

BIRD SANCTUARY (Kate MacDonald)Using a vehicle whose provenance I can’t detail, I drove to the bungalows I’d rented upstate. I had equipped one of them with everything a person would need to survive three months of pandemic. Bags of cat food, too.

I feared the place had been ransacked by now, but the locals hadn’t touched it.

I parked the vehicle in the corner of some woods in the back and covered it with loose limbs and leaves. By then the heat was up and I could carry Anna inside. She seemed to think it was a rented ski shack. It was a poignant way to find out she enjoys skiing.

I hung blackout fabrics over the windows so no one would detect our presence. Then I cooked up a pot of steaming soup, chicken noodle from cans and bottled spices.

For the first time in months, I felt fully free, alive. There was no authority in sight, just four cozy walls of cheap paneling. Only nature lay outside, harboring nothing against us but a stiff autumnal chill.

That night I clutched Anna’s hot little body like a thermal pillow. Her sick sweat tasted better than Irish whiskey. But she remained insensate under the damp cooling cloths I applied. I didn’t sleep for fear she’d pass away in my arms.

Eighteen hours later Anna was still very weak, but we managed some conversation. I explained where we were, who had helped us, and where we were going. She said my bungalow needed seasoning, a very good sign.

A Process of Communication

Anna said she knew it would come to this. I was slow to understand. She drank some freshly prepared soup. Her face glistened, eyes bright. She was coming back.

Eventually Anna was strong enough to explain that she’d always known she’d wind up in my hands. When she was badgering my blog, mocking my reverence for Ayn Rand, dissing my heartache over Nina, it wasn’t a game so much as a process of communication, she said.

I had to learn what was important, whatever that means. (I do think I know what’s important, for sure.)

Anna giggled faintly at how she’d set her account to block my emails so I could only respond publicly. She rolled her puffy eyes at how dreary I had been at Ric’s reopening—until I started smoking weed and making out with the young med student I mistook for my stalker.

Ric had blessed Anna’s strategy as the most promising way to crack my “thick shell of self-importance.” Some friend, eh? The best.

She kissed me as hard as she could, wetting her lips with mine. I could feel her little body straining. I was happier than I’ve ever been, no exaggeration.

Then the door rattled, hard.

Pounding followed. A gruff voice vowed to blow the lock off if we didn’t open up.

I hid Anna’s soup bowl and covered her with the bloody blanket that had kept her warm during the drive up. Then I unlatched the door to find the man who had rented me the bungalow.

My landlord was pointing a shotgun at my chest. He didn’t recognize me, but he was wearing one of the masks I’d given him. Goggles, too. And work gloves.

I told him I was glad my gear had kept him safe, asked him if he needed to see my rental agreement. He nodded, escorted me inside at gunpoint.

He stopped dead when he saw Anna, pale and motionless under that red-splattered blanket.

I asked if any friends or anyone at all had come to look for me. (Could the Feds have overlooked this place?) He grunted negatively and left.

I packed as fast as I could. There was a lot of protective gear and food and rice milk. I filled plastic jugs with reverse osmosis water I’d been processing since we arrived. And I dug up two safety cans of gasoline I’d buried in the yard; I’m driving a guzzler.

It was far too early and extremely risky to move Anna, but we were gone in 90 minutes.

The last words I heard from her since then came just after midnight, long ago. I think I have enough gas to get her to rich sun before it’s too late. It’s a long way.

Keep wishing us well, please.

I’m lying low. I have finally and definitively transgressed, added to my list of ‘crimes.’  My activities remain relatively victimless, though the latest was a little tricky.

LOUIS BRANDEIS NEVER SMILED, BUT HE WOULD HAVE ENJOYED MY CRIMEHaving obtained the Relenza that made risks worth taking, I went to Brandeis High School with a box that contained a few masks I was able to gather. I bet everything on double zero. I feel certain that ol’ Justice Brandeis would have approved.

First I arranged for a getaway car and a driver to get us to it. Then I labeled the box of masks with a phony purchase order from A. Rand MD. Next I convinced a National Guard with a southern accent and a fuzzy improvised mask that smelled of lemon detergent that I was delivering emergency medical gear to a doctor at the school. He was standing at the gates of a surprisingly modern building that must have replaced the original school.

An edgy moment came when he asked if I was sure there was a doctor on duty. Are these places untended by physicians? I reached ito the box and handed him a proper mask, which he appreciated.

No one bothered me once I got upstairs. The second floor was stuffy and smelled awful, as if the world’s biggest septic system had erupted like Vesuvius. The classrooms were packed with people on metal cots moaning softly, hopelessly—a symphony of death paced by wheezing and rattling lungs and occasional grunts and moans. The sturdiest souls blinked at me as I scanned for Anna.

If I’d been wearing black and carrying a scythe, I doubt it would have stirred them.

The attendants were draftees in lime green t-shirts and caps, with fuzzy paper masks that couldn’t remotely suppress the stench of death, urine, vomit, and crap. They were supervised by nurses with white paper masks that matched their uniforms. One nurse seemed particularly fatigued as she patiently taught a clueless rookie how to keep patients hydrated. Her legs were unsteady as she rambled on.

I give them all credit for trying. No one was trying to disregard the plentiful misery. The staff lacked tools to do anything substantive. There was very little equipment, no ventilators or monitors. Nor any sign of Relenza—or Diskhalers—which shocked me.

Anna was in the corner of a big classroom at the end of the floor, sweating it out under a big display about French verbs. J’irais, it said, right over her head, which looked prettier and smaller than anyone else’s. I would go. And that’s what we did.

I dressed Anna under the covers. She didn’t recognize me. She looked so vulnerable. Her face was flushed, lips dry and cracked. She was dying.

I heard a death reported in the hallway, the voice of a new conscript reverberating with fear. A radio crackled as someone called for a truck. For once I hoped it wouldn’t arrive quickly.

I could feel Anna’s fever through my jacket when I lifted her, but she was scarcely a burden. How could she already have lost so much weight? It was awkward carrying her and the box, but the masks were too valuable to leave behind.

A pair of draftees approached to ask what I was doing. I hadn’t thought of anything clever, so I explained I was taking my wife home. Evidently this entails visits to various city agencies for authorization.

The Challenge of Authority

I promised that a doctor would see her, kept moving. They looked at each other, speechless.

Then I heard the voice of authority, barking that I wasn’t taking the patient anywhere. This nurse was like a nun I once knew, a short-fused guardian of order named Sister Victoria. There could be no appeal to reason or emotion.

I secured Anna over my left shoulder and rammed my hand into the box so I could wield it like a cardboard club. I raced from quickening exclamations into a stairwell that would take us near an exit on the ground floor.

Downstairs, the nurse was already aiming a soldier our way. The exit was locked, a violation of the fire code. We were trapped.

Calmly, I strolled toward the Guard. He held his M16 ready while I explained that I needed to take my wife home now, that I had medication and a doctor awaiting her. I could see this made sense to him. He was a southerner and it’s what he’d want to do if his wife were filed away to die alone in a big, smelly brick schoolhouse.

He radioed for his sergeant. There were at least three Guards on duty.

He looked away when he started describing my situation. He felt guilty.

I moved by instinct. I think I bent to slide Anna onto the floor and then rose up under his weapon and into his belly. He was bigger than me, so he had more wind to lose. I ducked and hurled my shoulder into him again. I was celebrated as a gritty tackle in high school, making up in focused dementia what I lacked in brawn. I may have slammed him three times. He fell hard, his weapon clattering on the floor.

Shouts and bootsteps followed as I hoisted Anna and burst through the front door, past the first southerner. “She’s mah wife,” I yelled. “We’re from Missoura!”

As we passed the gate and reached the curb, I heard more than one sliding click as Guards cocked their weapons. I could only run eastward, hoping they’d pause at the thought of shooting an unconscious patient.

A car screeched between the M16s and us, as if to ask me for directions. A chorus of curses erupted as I leapt into the back seat with Anna in my arms like a broken doll. I heard a shot as we screeched around the corner, down Columbus Avenue.

I can say that Anna is resting in a safe place. She still hasn’t spoken and has issued some blood. She can’t be moved.

Wish us well. I’ll do my best to keep you posted.

IT CAN'T BE TOO LATE

The powder and Diskhalers look good. A handshake and a square look still count with me. They have to.

Here’s a slice of Gene Clark’s Radio Song for y’all while I get busy:

It isn't long since she's been gone but now I need her more

A wise man wrote what isn't there is what you want to find

So now I'll have to find her so that I won't lose my mind.



I’ve heard of the place, but I had to google to find out where and what it is.

POE WOULD HAVE SNEERED AT MY PRIMITIVE PLANS, BUT HE'D APPRECIATE MY FERVOR (Frank Zirbel)Not many of New York’s high schools can boast that Edgar Allan Poe is thought to have penned The Raven on the corner. Founded as the High School of Commerce in 1902 and renamed for America’s first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis High School’s most famous alumnus is Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees’ Iron Man, whose death was so memorable that they named the disease after him.

Not a good omen for my Iron Angel.

On the other hand, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) was a magnificent libertarian! He opposed central economic planning, favored individual rights. In 1890 Brandeis began constructing the legal theory for a Constitutional right that we still can't take for granted. In 1928, as a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis spoke of an American “right of privacy” in a dissent that became law 39 years later, when the Court overturned the earlier ruling he had opposed.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” he wrote then, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Why am I googling and posting? I’m waiting to see if the Relenza shows up. Anna needs it instantly.

In 1918 flu patients were warehoused in public buildings, too. They served as rooms with food and water. There was no significant medical equipment, no care beyond that which victims with kin might have found at home. They were places in which to die.

I will not let that happen to Anna.

Here are some choice Brandeis quotes while I chew my fingers and wait to see if the guy I’m waiting for has any honor.

“Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.”

“Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

There’s even one for Hope-Simpson fans: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

How much natural wisdom have we forgotten? In this age of triple antibiotic ointment, how many people suspect that sunlight is a disinfectant? Turns out it’s true (as this evangelical Christian web page about sunlight's wonders explains so eloquently).

She sounded woozy, which diminished the fury with which she greeted my question about her daughter’s death certificate. I assured her that I was merely sorting out our papers, not attempting to snoop into hers.

NO MEDICAL SERVICES, JUST CHINESE HERBS (Here, snakes, turtles & ginseng)She said she’d never claimed her daughter died directly from bird flu. The girl was a collateral casualty who had come down with appendicitis, unusual in kids under 6. The city was in the first blush of pandemic panic and no ambulance was available. Nor were any taxis.

Anna had carried her daughter to a hospital just south of City Hall in the financial district, but found only people stretched out inside some locked doors. The place was sealed. As she pleaded for entry, a masked patient pointed to a sign that directed visitors to a bigger hospital north of the East Village, almost two miles away. Then the woman pointed to her chest and to the other patients on the floor and made a throat-cutting motion.

An old Chinese man who didn’t speak English led her to a shop in Chinatown, where he obtained some herbs for the child. He helped her home. By then she was herself gasping, hot-headed.

The little girl died horribly at home that night, when her appendix burst. Enough said.

Anna immediately came down with something she still thinks was the flu. She was feverish, achy, congested, lying for days in the apartment with her daughter’s corpse. She would dream her baby had recovered, sleepwalk to her, and break down all over again.

Recounting the horror made Anna cry so intensely I started dressing to fetch her. I could hear her getting sicker as she sobbed and gasped. Her voice was failing as she climbed aboard the bus.

I didn’t say this to her, but I’m scared she’s caught a new strain. I’m trying to get that Relenza while I wait for her to get home.

Judging from the mess in the kitchen, she wasn’t feeling better.

NOT FLU: AN EARLY STAGE OF ACUTE APENDICITIS IN A CHILD (Ed Uthman, MD)I’m still tidying the papers the police scattered, recreating my files as best I can. Some of the documents belong to Anna, who brought them here after the 7^th Precinct tossed her apartment. The rampaging 9^th mixed our papers pretty badly.

So I squat every day in a sunbeam, where Sneeky should be soaking up Vitamin D. I sort documents into stacks he would have delighted in scattering.

Today I found the death certificate of Anna’s little girl, whom I knew to have died of flu in Round One, when they both caught it. It said she was three years old and she died at home, in their apartment near the Manhattan Bridge. Of a ruptured appendix.

I don’t know what this means.

I looked up the symptoms. They’re a lot like flu—vomiting, stomach pain, fever, loss of appetite. But it wasn’t flu.

I tried to call Anna at work, though it’s forbidden. No answer.

I’ll wait.

Meanwhile I’ve called the New York City Department Of Health And Mental Hygiene to ask what specific test they perform on conscripts before they force them to work closely with potential flu carriers. Presumably it was a microneutralization assay that would show antibodies from previous H5N1 exposure, but it seemed wise to ask. I was told to expect a callback.

I got a call from someone at a different agency. She wanted to know why I was asking. I explained. She said she wasn’t authorized to address medical issues.

When I checked the number she’d left on my caller ID, it turned out to be a Department of Homeland Security exchange.