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Long Odds, Episode 3: The Museum · Long Odds

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: Long Odds, Episode Three: The Museum.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: In the third inning, Luis Ortega's father called, and Clara Benning was the one holding the phone.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: She had gone upstairs for it at a quarter past eight on Saturday night, which was against the rules, though not one of the rules that kept anybody alive.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: Phones never crossed.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: They waited on the ground floor of the records annex in a row of gray lockers, each with a strip of masking tape and a name in marker.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: And taped inside the door of Luis's locker was a photograph of two teenagers on a couch, rolling their eyes at whoever held the camera with a coordination so perfect it must have been rehearsed.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: Clara looked at it a second longer than she needed to.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: Then she sealed the phone in a clear plastic bag, carried it down two flights to the basement, passed the door with the sign that said occupational health, and slid it through the meal hatch of the second room on the left.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_07: You're a saint, Louise said through the glass.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_07: Warden, you're a saint in a hairnet.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a surgical cap.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I wear it because my hair is a disgrace.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Don't take that phone out of the bag.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The screen works through the plastic.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you take it out, I'll know and I'll take it away, and I'll call your father myself and tell him why.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_07: You'd break his heart.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Tonight I don't think I'd have to.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: By any sensible arithmetic, they should all have gone home that afternoon.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: The rule was seventy two hours in the ward after a crossing, and Team One had come up out of the sealed van on Wednesday.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: But Clara had never thought of seventy two hours as a promise.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: It was the least she would accept.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: The last round of swabs had gone to a lab that was down to one technician for the long weekend.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: The technician had a sick kid, and Clara did not release people on a guess.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: So they had one more night.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: Luis had taken the news the way he took most things, loudly at first, and then generously.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: And by supper, he had forgiven her enough to ask whether the television in the upstairs break room happened to be on wheels.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: Now it sat in the middle of the basement hallway on a steel cart, its cord taped down across the linoleum, facing the windows of the four small rooms like a campfire with four tents around it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: Clara sat beside it in a folding chair with a clipboard on her knee.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: In the first window, Inez Carvalho stood with her arms folded, watching a sport she had described to Clara, only on Thursday, as a tax return with a seventh inning stretch.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: She had not complained once all evening, which Clara understood to be a gift to Luis.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: In the third window, Owen Tate sat cross legged on his bed with a paper cup of tea, asking questions about the infield fly rule that nobody had the strength to answer.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: And in the last window, Hannah Whitlock had pulled her chair up against the glass, chin in her hands, watching the faces in the crowd more than the ball.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Which was how Hannah watched everything.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: On the screen, the White Sox were in Cleveland, and it was the fifth game of five.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: On Monday, they had been two games up.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: Then they had lost twice in Chicago in front of their own people.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: And now it came down to one night.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: Winner take all, and the winner would go on to play for the pennant.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: The last time the White Sox had played for a pennant, Hannah had been in middle school.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: Luis had mentioned this several times.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: In the top of the third, the phone lit up inside its bag.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Luis said.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: Through the plastic and the glass, Clara could just make out the voice on the other end.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: Small and tinny and enormous with feeling.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: It belonged to an old man on the south side of Chicago, who had been sitting in the same spot on the same couch since 1983.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_07: I'm watching.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_07: Pop, I'm watching.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_07: Where else would I be?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_07: West Virginia.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_07: Same as always.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_07: A barracks.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_07: They got a TV on a cart.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_07: No, it's a good TV.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_07: Somebody wheeled it in special.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: The lie slid out of him smooth as a ball down a bowling lane, and Clara noticed, because noticing was most of her job, that it was about a third true.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: She had wheeled the cart herself.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: For six innings, she sat in a basement outside Washington and listened to a father and a son watch a ballgame together from seven hundred miles apart.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: They argued about the manager.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: They argued about a young relief pitcher, whom Luis's father referred to only as that kid.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: They agreed, with the solemnity of two bishops, that Cleveland starter was pitching the game of his life, and that it was a crime, and that somebody ought to look into it.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: He struck out twelve of them before he was through.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: When Jose Ramirez put one over the wall, Luis made a sound like somebody stepping on an accordion, and Owen asked through the glass whether he needed medical attention, and Luis told him to mind his own business in a voice that also meant thank you.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: Cleveland two, Chicago nothing.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: In the ninth, the White Sox went down in order.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: One, two, three.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't even make it interesting.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: For a while nobody in the hallway said anything.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: On the screen, men in Cleveland uniforms were piling on top of each other in the infield.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: Luis sat on the edge of his bed, with the bagged phone against his ear and his other hand over his eyes.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Pop, he said.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_07: I know.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_07: Next year.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_07: I know you've been saying next year since I was in diapers.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_07: Because every year it's true, that's why.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_07: Love you too.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_07: Turn the TV off, Pop.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_07: Don't sit there and listen to them talk about it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_07: Turn it off.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: He lowered the phone and looked at it.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: For what it's worth.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: Owen said gently, from the third window.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_06: Somewhere out there they won.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_06: Don't I'm only saying on the dial there have to be Owen?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_06: Inez said.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_07: Somewhere out there they won, Bambi.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_07: Louise said.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm not in it.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_07: That's not a comfort.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_07: That's a curse.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: Then he laughed, a little raggedly, and rubbed his face with both hands.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_07: You know the Pope's a Sox fan?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_07: Chicago kid.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_07: All the way over in Rome, and it didn't help one bit.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_06: Maybe he was praying for Cleveland.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Owen said.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_06: Take that back.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_06: I take it back.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: Luis held the phone up to the glass and looked at Clara.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: One more.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Clara picked up her clipboard and found something on it that required her complete attention.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: Marisol answered on the first ring.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: Clara couldn't hear her.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: Only Luis.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: And Luis's half of a marriage turned out to be its own kind of broadcast.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_07: Hey, yeah, I saw.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_07: He called you first in the fourth?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_07: Of course he did.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_07: He wanted somebody to yell with.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_07: Did the kids watch?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_07: Both of them, huh?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_07: That's something.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: A long pause and his voice changed.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Where am I?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: Clara kept her eyes on the clipboard.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: It was the week's swab results, and she had now read it eleven times.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, Luis said.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: In the last window, Hannah had gone very still.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_07: You want to know where I actually am?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_07: I'm in a basement, Mari.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_07: With a doctor and a shower cap, and a TV on a cart, and three people from work in their pajamas, all of us locked in little rooms like a zoo.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: Something happened to his face then.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: And Clara looked up in spite of herself and saw Luis Ortega, who had been a medic in places he never talked about, sitting on a narrow bed in quarantine, with wet eyes and a grin like a boy's.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_07: No, I swear.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_07: I swear on my mother.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_07: I know, I know it does.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_07: Tomorrow, first thing I promise.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_07: Kiss them for me.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_07: Me too, Mary.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_07: Me too.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: He slid the phone back through the hatch, bag and all, and sat looking at his hands.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_07: She laughed.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_07: He said, Five years she's been asking me.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_07: The one time I tell her the honest truth, she thinks it's the funniest thing she ever heard.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hanna would tell you that's the best cover there is, Clara said.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: It is, said Hannah, from the last window.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_08: But that's not why she laughed.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_03: Luis looked over.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: Why'd she laugh?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_08: Because you answered her.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: Hannah said.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_08: Five years, and that's the first time you didn't change the subject.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: Luis didn't say anything for a while after that.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: He lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling tiles.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: You ever married Warden?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: He said at last.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Once.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: What happened?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was late, and the game was over.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: And nobody was going to remember any of this in the morning except possibly Hannah, who remembered everything.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Gary, Clara said.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: He left in 2018.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was absolutely certain I was having an affair.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: The nights I didn't come home.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: The phone I couldn't answer, the clinic I couldn't name.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'd come in at four in the morning smelling like hospital soap, and he'd be sitting at the kitchen table in the dark waiting.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_04: Were you?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: No, Clara said.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have preferred it.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: An affair I could have explained.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Luis laughed out loud, and then he stopped laughing.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the hallway was quiet, except for the hum of the air handlers, drawing the air out of the four rooms and pushing it through the filters and away.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, Clara, he said.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Don't be.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was a terrible cook.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: She stood and unplugged the television.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Lights out in ten minutes, all of you.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Your swabs come back in the morning.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If they're clean, you're free.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: If they're not, you belong to me forever.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: Her office was at the far end of the basement, a former file room with no window and a door that didn't quite latch.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: It held a desk, a cot, a filing cabinet, a small refrigerator with a padlock on it, and a steel shelving unit that Clara referred to, to anyone who would listen, as the museum.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: The museum was where the things that came home waited out their 72 hours, and some of them waited a great deal longer.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: Just now, the top shelf held a pint jar of peach preserves with a square of gingham tied over the lid and a label in somebody else's handwriting that said August.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: The shelf below held a lump of coal the size of a fist, black and glittering inside its bag, from a world where the trains still ran on it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: The refrigerator held a prescription bottle, also bagged, with five small white pills inside.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: On Thursday, it had held six.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: On Saturday afternoon, when its 72 hours were up, Clara had signed one out by courier to a chemist in Geithersburg, and had felt signing as though she were mailing a diamond in a shoebox.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: She took her notebook out of the bottom drawer of the desk, from underneath three years of tax forms where nobody would ever think to look, and opened it on her knee.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: It was a green cloth-bound notebook of the kind scientists used before everything went onto screens.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: And she had kept it for 11 years since her first month at the survey.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody knew about it.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: That was the only rule she had ever made for it.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: It held 41 entries, one for every time something had come through the door of this basement, and very nearly gotten past her.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Number three was a seed in the cuff of a man's trousers from a dial 5 world, which had sprouted in the drain of the decontamination shower before anybody noticed.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Number 12 was a young operator who had eaten a fish he shouldn't have.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: Nine days in a room down the hall with a fever nobody ever managed to name, which broke on its own at three in the morning, while Clara sat outside his window praying to a god she wasn't sure she believed in.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: Number 26 was a sample bag that came home with a hole in it the size of a pencil eraser, and two weeks of Clara not sleeping.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: And number 41 in April was a cut on Luis Ortega's knee from a wet rock in World 287, which came home red and hot and swollen and turned out, after two very long days, to be ordinary staff.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Ours.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: She had never in her life been so happy to see staff.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: Forty-one times something had nearly gotten past her, and forty-one times it hadn't.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: And she knew perfectly well that those were only the ones she had caught.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: That was the trouble with a list like this.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: It could only ever hold the near misses.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: The real ones wouldn't be near.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: She put the notebook back under the tax forms without writing anything and picked up the log for Nevada, where Team 2 was sitting out its own 72 hours in a trailer on a hill above the Humboldt River.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: Ada Brennan called in every six hours, regular as a ship's bell, and read off three temperatures.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: All normal, all week.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: In the margin beside the Saturday evening call, in Clara's own handwriting, was a short note.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: Femi Stuffy says it's the dust.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: She tapped the note twice with her pen, turned off the lamp, and lay down on the cot in her clothes.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: She slept the way she had slept for 25 years, lightly, with one ear on the hall.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: The swabs came back at 20 to 8 on Sunday morning, every one of them clean.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: And at 8 o'clock, Clara walked down the hallway unlocking doors.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: Release mornings had their own weather.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: People came out of the rooms blinking and tender, the way people come out of a hospital, glad and a little embarrassed, and not quite sure what to do with their hands.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: Inez hugged Clara briefly and hard and said, Thank you for the television.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_08: Luis wept.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: I did not weep, Luis said.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: I perspired from the eyes.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Clara had their things laid out on the long table by the elevator, each in a clear bag with a name on it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_03: Most of it was ordinary: wool jackets, a canteen, a paperback with its cover torn off.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: The hall stayed with her.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: But a few things were neither ordinary nor whole, and those she had saved for last.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: She held up the jar.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_03: Hanna came and took it in both hands and looked at it for a long time.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: The gingham.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: The handwriting.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_08: Is it safe?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: She said finally.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: To eat, I mean.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's peaches, sugar, and a woman who has never met you.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: Clara said.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the safest thing in this building.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Hannah laughed, and it came out a little wet, and she held the jar against her chest.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's something else, Clara said.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Femi asked me on Thursday to give you a message.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I held on to it.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I figured news like that ought to come with something you could hold.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: What news?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: He took a reading at dial four when he went out with team two.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: He said to tell you the line was thin.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: Hannah's head came up.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: She looked at Clara with those quick, careful eyes that never missed anything.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: And Clara could see her running through the whole thing.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Femi's radio dial, the crowded stations, the fat, fuzzy humps on every chart he had ever shown them.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: A thin line meant a station alone on its part of the dial.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: A station alone was a station you could find again.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_08: Did he give you a number?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: Hanna said.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_08: No.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_08: Then he thinks it's real.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: Hanna looked down at the jar.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_08: He always gives a number when he's guessing.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_08: He only goes quiet when he's afraid it's true.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: She was silent a moment.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_08: So it's the strange worlds we can find again.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_08: And the ones next door, the ones that look like home.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: She stopped and turned the jar so the label faced her.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_08: Well, that figures, doesn't it?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_08: It's one reading.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: Clara said.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_08: I know.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_08: Tell him thank you.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_08: Tell him I understood.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: At the far end of the table, Luis had his bag open and was holding a postcard.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: Clara knew it.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: It had come home in his jacket from World 294.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: A canal in autumn, a mule on the towpath, a boat behind the mule, the kind of picture that hadn't changed in 60 years.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: She had held it 72 hours like everything else.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: He turned it over and held it out to her.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Read it, he said.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_07: Tell me if it's against the rules.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: The back was covered in his small square printing, the handwriting of a medic who had spent twenty years writing doses on strips of tape.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Mari.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: I was somewhere this week where everything looked like home and nothing was.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: A man was alive there who is dead here, and the river looked exactly like ours.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: I thought about you the whole time.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: Someday I am going to tell you all of it.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: That is a promise, not an excuse.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: Elle Clara read it twice.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_07: If Walt reads this, she said, he'll have a stroke.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_07: Walt's not getting a postcard.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Someday is a big word, Louis.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in this building.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_07: So is actually.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_07: He took the card back.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_07: I didn't know what to write on Thursday.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_07: I knew by Friday.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_07: I wanted to sit with it one more night, make sure it still sounded true in the morning.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_07: He looked up.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_07: You got a stamp?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: Clara did.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: She was fifty-two years old, and she kept a book of stamps in her desk drawer the way her mother had kept one in her purse, against emergencies.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: He stuck one in the corner very straight, put the card inside his jacket, and patted it twice.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_07: Mailbox on the corner.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_07: He said.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_06: That he said is the least comforting thing anybody has ever said to me.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_03: You asked.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: Over by the elevator, Hannah was trying to sign the release sheet on her knee while holding the jar, and doing neither one very well.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Owen went over and held out his hands without a word, and she gave him the jar.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: He held it the way you'd hold a baby bird that might decide at any moment to leave.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_03: She signed.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: He gave it back.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_03: Neither of them said a thing.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: Clara watched the elevator doors close.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: On the four of them, and thought, not for the first time, that it was none of her business, which had never once in her life stopped her.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: At ten, she called Nevada.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: It was seven in the morning out there, and Ada Brennan answered on the trailer speakerphone, sounding like a woman who had been up since five, knitting.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Temperatures Clara said.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Walker, 98.1.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Me 97.9, because I'm cold-blooded.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Femi, 98.6 on the nose.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: He'd like it noted that it's the first round number he's ever produced.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And his nose?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Still running.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's been sneezing since Friday like a man who's allergic to the state of Nevada.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: I am allergic to the state of Nevada.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: said Femi's voice, from somewhere farther back in the trailer.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: He says it's the dust.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Ada said.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's very dry out here.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he spent most of Wednesday with his face in a coal fire, so.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: Clara looked at the note in her margin.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Run the quick test on him before you go, she said.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: The little cassette in the kit.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: There was some muttering and the sound of a swab coming out of its paper.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: And then fifteen minutes of Ada describing a scarf she was knitting for her nephew in Juno, which was going to be finished by Christmas, or she was going to throw it in the Humboldt.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: One line, Ada said at last.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Negative.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: Clara sat back.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: The quick tests were a coin flip in a nice box.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody in medicine knew it.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: They caught the flu maybe half the time, a little better on a good day, and missed it the rest.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: But a quick test was what you could keep in a trailer, and it said negative, and the man's temperature was normal.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it was October.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: The flu had come early out west this year, early enough that a children's hospital in Seattle was seeing December numbers in the first week of October.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: But in October something was always early somewhere.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody in America had a cold.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right, she said.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're released.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Pack the departure swabs in the specimen cooler and seal it.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Femi brings it home on the plane in the overhead bin, Ada said.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Labeled as water samples.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Waltz Budget at work.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Walt's budget is the reason you have a trailer, Ada.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Before the trailer it was a tent.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Before the trailer it was better, Ada said.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Tents don't have Walker snoring in them.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: I heard that.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: Then Femi came to the phone, his voice thick and stuffy and happy.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: Clara, did you tell her?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: This morning with the jar.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: What did she say?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: She said you didn't give a number, so you must think it's true.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: There was a long silence on the line.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: Then Femme said softly, she's right.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: And blew his nose like a trumpet and said he would see her tonight.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: Agnes Lowry called at eleven, which was when she had said she would call, because Agnes Lowry was 71 years old, had spent forty of those years making medicines for a very large drug company, and had never once in her life been late for anything.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: She was the survey's chemist, though not on paper.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: On paper she was retired and rented half a laboratory in an office park in Geithersburg, and did, as she put it, odd jobs for odd people.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: Walt had found her years ago.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: She had a clearance and a temper, and a tenderness for molecules that she did not, as a rule, extend to human beings.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_04: Clara, she said, without saying hello.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Before we start, I'm not going to ask you where you got a government drug label for a drug that doesn't exist.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to ask whether you know what you've got.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: Clara pulled a legal pad toward her.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: First, it's real.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: The pill is exactly what that drawing says it is.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I ground up half of it.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Which I want you to know I did with great personal reluctance and ran it every way I know how.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Same molecule.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Pure as anything I ever made in a factory.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: The binder and the coating are ordinary drugstore stuff.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: The same as in a bottle of aspirin.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody somewhere was turning these out by the million, like they were nothing special at all.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_04: She paused.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Second, I found it.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Found what?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Found it here.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: On Thursday.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: After you sent me the photographs of that sheet, I ran the drawing through the patent files.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: My nephew put one of these new search assistants on my computer.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: The kind you talk to like a person.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: It reads patents in German and Japanese.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: It never needs a nap.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's wrong about a third as often as my graduate students used to be.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: It found it in four minutes.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Penrose Laboratories, Baltimore.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: They filed on it in 2007 and called it Compound 117.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: Clara set her pen down.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Penrose, she said, Here.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Here.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's been sitting in a public patent file for 19 years.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone on earth could have looked it up.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: Agnes made a noise that might have been a laugh.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And now I have to tell you about gloves.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Put your hands together, palm to palm.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Go on.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I can hear you not doing it.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: Clara put her hands together.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Same fingers, same thumb, same everything made of the same stuff.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But your left hand isn't your right hand, and you can't get your left glove onto your right hand no matter how hard you pull.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of molecules are like that.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: They come in two versions mirror images, a left hand and a right hand, the same atoms in the same order.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the body is full of gloves.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: So a drug's left hand can fit one place and its right hand another place.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or nowhere or somewhere you'd very much rather it didn't.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's asking me about handedness all of a sudden, now that they've gone and given a no-bel for it.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: My grandson thinks I'm famous by association.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_04: She sniffed.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what matters.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: When Penrose made compound 117 here, they made it the cheap way.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Both hands mixed half and half.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: And they tested the mixture 2010 to 2012 on 400 patients.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the right hand, it turns out, likes to settle in the liver and irritated.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the patients' liver numbers crept up.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing dramatic, but enough that the safety people made them cut the dose in half.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: And at half the dose, the left hand, which is the one doing the actual work, never got a fair chance.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: The trial missed.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Barely, but it missed.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: The investors went home.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Penrose closed its doors in the spring of 2013.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And a company in New Jersey bought the furniture.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: Clara wrote spring 2013 on her pad and drew a box around it.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Agnes said, Your pills are left hand only.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Every molecule.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody separated them, which is harder and costs more, and gave people the full dose and nothing settled in anybody's liver.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if that sheet is telling the truth, which I have no way on God's earth of checking, they ran eleven thousand people for three years and cut heart attacks and strokes by about a third.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: On top of whatever else those people were already taking.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: Clara found that she had stopped breathing and started again.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the part that'll keep me up tonight.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Agnes said more quietly.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: In the old Penrose patent here at home, there's one sentence, page 40 or so.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: It says, and I'm reading it to you, that separation of the two forms was considered and not pursued for reasons of cost.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Reasons of cost?
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Somewhere somebody pursued it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: Agnes said.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody had a better Tuesday in 2008.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's all it was, Clara.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: One sentence.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: One person with a little more money or a little more nerve, or a boss who woke up in a good mood.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: Clara thought of a line from Ada's report on the Nevada Crossing.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: Something Femi had said on a bench in a world without airplanes.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_03: That there was never one switch.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: Only a hundred thumbs on the scale.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: What does it actually do?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: she said.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: In plain words.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have to explain it to Walt, and Walt was a history major.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: It calms things down inside the artery wall.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Cholesterol builds up in there.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the body treats it like a splinter, and it's the swelling and fuss around the splinter that makes the thing burst and clot.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Think of a campfire.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: The cholesterol is the kindling.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: The inflammation is the match.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Statins clear away the kindling.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: This takes away the matches.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Side effects and in the fine print.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: A small rise in serious infections.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: About one extra pneumonia for every 300 people a year.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Take away a few matches and you take away a little of what fights off germs.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing's free.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Never has been.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: She paused.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Clara, I've been at this forty years.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: I have never held anything like this in my hands.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't do a thing with it.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because when Penrose went bankrupt, it stopped paying the fees on its patent.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the patent died.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Compound 117 belongs to everybody now, which means it belongs to nobody.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Which means no company on earth will ever spend a billion dollars in ten years proving that it works.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because the minute they finished, anybody with a garage could make it for a nickel a pill.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: The left hand alone might be patentable as something new.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: But somebody would have to discover that it works better.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Show it.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: From scratch, honestly, with real experiments and real patience.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Five years at the very least, and a few hundred million dollars before the first person who needs it gets a single pill.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And whoever does it can never see that sheet of yours or know it exists.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: She was quiet a second.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'll send you my notes.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: The other half of the pill is in a vial in my safe.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can have it back whenever you want.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'd rather you didn't ask.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: Walt Sobieski came down at half past twelve because Clara called him at home, and because Walt came whenever anybody called holiday or no holiday.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: He was sixty-three, with a cardigan over his collared shirt and reading glasses on a cord, and he looked like exactly what he was.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_03: A man who had spent forty years in rooms where money got argued over, and had won most of the arguments by being the last one still awake.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: He sat in the only other chair in her office, an upholstered thing in hospital teal, and listened without interrupting while she read him her notes.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: When she was done, he was quiet for a while.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_05: You know where that chair came from, he said at last.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Government surplus.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_05: Fisco year twenty eleven.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_05: Occupational wellness furniture, four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_05: I needed a quarantine ward, and you can't very well put a quarantine ward in a federal budget, so I called it furniture.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: He patted the arm of the chair.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_05: The furniture's real.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_05: The committee wanted something it could hold in its hands.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_05: And you're telling me it can hold this in its hands, and that's about all it can do with it.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: It can't sell it.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: It can't prove it.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it can't explain where it came from.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: Clara looked down at her pad.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Walt, about eight hundred thousand Americans have a heart attack every year.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's not my number, that's the disease centers in Atlanta.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: If this does hear what that sheet says it did there, and only half the people who ought to take it actually do, you're looking at something like a hundred thousand heart attacks a year that don't happen.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: In this country alone, that's close to three hundred a day.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Every day this sits in my refrigerator is three hundred Dale Pruits on three hundred ladders.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_05: Walt, I'm just asking, if a world is easy to find again, how much room is there in it?
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_05: How much of Nevada over there is spoken for?
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nevada over there has trains in it.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_05: That's what I told him.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_05: And he said very reasonably that it was early days and he was only thinking out loud, and that if the thin worlds turn out to be the far ones, some of them won't have anybody in them at all.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: Walt paused.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_05: And then he asked whether the people who went to live in one would necessarily have to be volunteers.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_05: He asked it the way you'd ask whether a restaurant takes reservations.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_05: And then he said he was just asking.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_05: He's always just asking.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_05: He is.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_05: And one of these days he's going to stop asking and start telling, and I'd like to be in the room when he does.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: Walt got up slowly, one hand on the arm of the furniture.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_05: He's coming out Tuesday.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_05: I'd like Agnes's notes on my desk before he gets here and Femi Strip on top of them, and I'd like you in the room.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_05: Why maybe?
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_05: Because you're the only one of us he's afraid of.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: Walt stopped at the door.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_05: Clara, you've been telling me to shut this place down for eleven years.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_05: Very politely every chance you get.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_05: Are you going to keep telling me?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: Clara thought about the notebook in her bottom drawer, and the five pills in the refrigerator, and found that she didn't have an answer that would fit through the door.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've got forty one reasons in a drawer, she said.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: And one in a refrigerator.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: What's in the drawer?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: Tax forms.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: Walt looked at her over his glasses.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't ask again.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was one of the things she liked about him.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Ask me Tuesday, Clara said.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: She spent the afternoon turning Agnes's notes into English that a history major could read aloud to a committee.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: At four, she went out and stood in the parking lot in her lab coat for ten minutes, because she had not seen the sky since Wednesday, and wanted to make sure it was still there.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: It was.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_03: A plane was letting itself down toward Dulles, slow and silver, its wheels already out.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_03: Fammi came in through the loading dock at twenty to nine that night, with the specimen cooler in one hand and a roll of chart paper in the other, looking like a man who had been awake for most of a week and enjoyed every minute of it.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: he said.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: He handed it over and went up the stairs two at a time, and coughed on the landing and kept going.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: Clara carried the cooler down to the little lab across from her office, broke the seal, and took out three swabs in three tubes, labeled in Ada's square hand.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: Brennan, Dunn, Adayemi.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: She loaded them one by one into the machine on the counter.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: It was a beige box about the size of a microwave oven, the most expensive thing in the basement.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: It could take a single swab from a person's nose and tell her which of 20 different germs were living in there.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: It took 45 minutes to do it, it ran hot, and it cost more to keep fed every year than she did.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: She called it Gary.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: While Gary hummed, she took the lump of coal down off the museum shelf.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: Its 72 hours had been up since that morning, and she meant to hand it back to Femi tonight, with a little speech about museums she had been composing in her head since lunch.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_03: She sat on a stool with the bag in her lap.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_03: Rock Springs Coal, said Ada's report.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: Best in the West, according to the old engineer who had handed it over in his last year on the grade.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: Gary chimed.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_03: Brennan, negative.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: Dunn, negative, Adayemi.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_03: Influenza.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: A H1 2009.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: Clara read it twice and then sat very still in the bright little lab while the printer finished its line and fell quiet.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: She knew those words the way she knew her own phone number.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: Influenza A, the kind that makes the big outbreaks.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_03: H1, the type.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: 2009, the year it arrived.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: It was the flu that had come back around the world every winter since the spring she was 35.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_03: The flu that was out west right now, early, filling a children's hospital in Seattle.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it was in Femi's nose.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: He had carried it into the building in a cooler and in himself, up the loading dock and up the stairs two at a time.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: At home in October, that was nothing.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: Half the people on his plane had probably had it.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Half the county would have it by Thanksgiving.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was the year she couldn't stop looking at.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: She took the slip of paper and the bag of coal and went upstairs.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: Walt's office was on the second floor, a big room that had once held county deed records and still had the green filing cabinets to prove it.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: The window looked out over the dark parking lot.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_03: Femi had cleared a space on Walt's desk and unrolled his strip of chart paper across it, holding the ends down with a stapler and a coffee mug.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_03: And he was leaning over it with one finger on the line, talking a mile a minute.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_03: Walt sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his cardigan, watching Femi's face instead of the paper.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: Every line I've ever taken at dial one and two looks like a crowd.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: Femi was saying fat and fuzzy, with shoulders on both sides.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_02: This one is a needle.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Walt, look at it, it's alone.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if that Holds, then the farther out we go, the easier a world is to find again.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: And everything I thought I knew about coming back is upside down.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: I need a dozen more readings.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: I know what that costs.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: I know two cells apiece and four months a cell, and I'm not going to say a number, I'm not, but he broke off to cough into his elbow and laughed and wiped his eyes.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, dust, and on the plane, Walt.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: I was reading about Edison's cells, nickel and iron.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: Thirty years, charged every night, if even half of that.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_05: One miracle per budget cycle, Femi.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_05: Walt said gently.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's my rule.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's not dust, Clara said from the doorway.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: They both looked up.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Femi saw her face and the slip in her hand, and the smile went slowly out of his.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's the flu, Clara said.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yours came up positive, Ada and Walker are clean.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: The quick tests said negative.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: The quick test is a coin flip in a nice box.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: I should have flown you a real one.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: She laid the slip on the desk beside his strip.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's the regular kind, the one going around.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: At home it's nothing.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: You go to bed for a few days, drink some soup, and stay away from anybody over 70.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: Then why do you look like that?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: When did your throat start, Femi?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: He thought.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: She watched him walk it back day by day.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: A careful man doing careful arithmetic.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: Thursday night, he said.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: In the trailer after we came home.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was the cold smoke.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: Then Friday my nose went and I thought it was the dust, and I didn't want He stopped.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't want you to keep me three more days.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: I had this.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: He touched the chart paper.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to bring it to Wolt.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't have mattered, Clara said.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd told me Thursday night, it wouldn't have changed a thing that counts.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: By Thursday night it was already done.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: She sat down on the corner of a filing cabinet because her legs had made the decision for her.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Where were you Monday night before you went out?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: At my sister's in Silver Spring for dinner.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: His face changed.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: My niece had a cold.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: She's six.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: She climbed all over me all evening.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody's kid has a cold.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you catch it Monday night, Clara said.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: The flu takes one to four days to show itself.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yours showed Thursday night, so call it three.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part people don't know.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can give it to somebody else for about a day before you feel a thing.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some people a little longer.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows exactly because you can't very well go around swabbing healthy people to find out which ones are about to get sick.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thursday night, back up a day.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wednesday night, Wednesday afternoon, if you were unlucky.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: She looked at him.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: Where were you on Wednesday afternoon, Femi?
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't have to answer.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: She had read Ada's report in the cab, he said at last.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: In the cab of 3721 with Joe.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: How long?
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: Two hours.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: His voice had gone very quiet.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's smaller than this office.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_02: We were shouting the whole way because you can't hear yourself think in there.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: He shook my hand when we met and again when we said goodbye.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: And he gave me his eyes went to the bag in her lap.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: He gave me that out of the tendo with his bare hand.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the fireman.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: Walt said quietly.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: Cody, yes.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: He never said a word.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: He was right there the whole time.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: But it's the flu, Clara.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's only the flu.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody gets the flu.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody here gets this flu.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_02: Clara said.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: She held up the slip so he could read it.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Two thousand nine.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the spring of two thousand nine, a flu came out of pigs.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: They noticed it first in Mexico and California.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a mix, bits of bird flu and pig flu and human flu that had been passed around among farm animals for years and shuffled like a deck of cards until one day the deck came out just so.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: It went around the world in a few months, and it's been one of the regulars ever since.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: It comes back every winter, a little different every year, and by now nearly everybody alive here has had some version of it, or had a shot for it, or had a mother who had it.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's nothing.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're used to it.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: A world that went its own way a hundred years ago, Clara said.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: Never had our pigs, never had our farms, or our spring of two thousand nine, or that deck coming out just so.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever flu they have over there went off in some other direction entirely.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: They've never seen this one, not once.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: Out on the road beyond the parking lot, a car went by, and its headlights swept across the green cabinets and were gone.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: How bad?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_03: Walt said.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: Clara made herself say it plainly.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe nothing.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Femi wasn't shedding yet on Wednesday afternoon.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: The textbook says about a day before.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: That puts it in the evening at the earliest, and the evening was the engine house and a handshake and that lump of coal.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Joe catches it and has a bad week and nobody else does.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the old people over there have something left in them from some flu their grandparents had a long time ago that looks a little like this one.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: That happened here in 2009.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: The old people did better than the young ones.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: She stopped.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it gets into a railroad town.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: Winnamaca, Femi said.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: A railroad town on a main line, Clara said.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: With a night train to San Francisco and a night train to Chicago.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: Out of that whole world, Femi, you pick the one town with a train to everywhere.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: Femi put his face in his hands.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_05: How many people live over there, Walt said.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_05: In the whole country.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that either.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody counted.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: Femi, Walt said gently.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_05: Give me a number.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_05: You always have a number.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: Femi lifted his head.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: His eyes were wet, and his voice, when it came, was stuffy and very soft.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: I can't bet on this one, Walt.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'd be betting with his money.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody said anything.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: Clara got up and set the bag of coal on the desk, beside the strip of paper with its thin, lonely line.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: She had meant to give it to him with her little speech about museums.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_03: She didn't make the speech.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_03: Femmie looked at the coal for a long moment and did not pick it up.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: How long?
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: Walt said at last.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_05: Have we been sending people out without a swab?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Since there was a door, I'd imagine.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: Clara said.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: You'd know better than I would, Walt, um Walt said nothing.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: He turned his chair and looked out the window at the dark parking lot for a long time, and Clara could not tell what he was seeing out there.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_05: Write it up.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_03: He said finally.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_05: Outbound screening, every crossing, swabs, temperatures, three days in the ward before anybody goes anywhere, if that's what it takes.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: Three days before and three days after.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's six days of cleared people per trip.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's money you don't have.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_05: I'll find the money.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: You always say that.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_05: I always do.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: He turned back from the window and touched the edge of the chart paper with one finger.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: Very lightly.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: The way you might touch a photograph.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_05: World 295, Clara.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_05: The thin one.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_05: The first world we might be able to go back to on purpose.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: He was quiet a moment.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_05: And this morning Neil asked me how much of Nevada over there was spoken for.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_03: From behind his hands, Femi said, We could go back.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: If it's thin, we could go back and see.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody answered him.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_03: After a while, Clara went downstairs.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_03: She called Ada first, and then Walker.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: Both of them home now, Ada in Reno and Walker at his place outside Elko, and told them the same thing.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: Test in the morning.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: Call the minute anything changes, Walker said.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, ma'am.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_03: And nothing else, which she found she appreciated.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: Ada was quiet for a long moment.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Is this about his nose?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: She said.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's about his nose.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: The seat only opened up.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_04: Ada said slowly.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because Pat was home with the flu.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's not funny.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_04: No, Clara said.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_03: When she had hung up, she sat at her desk in the circle of the lamp and thought about World 294.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: A diner on Main Street, a waitress named Deb with her sister's two sick kids, an old lineman taking a heart pill that took away a few of his matches.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_03: Team One had come home clean.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_03: She had the swabs to prove it.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_03: Every one of them had been taken after.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_03: She had nothing at all from before.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_03: She thought about calling Owen.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: He would be in his apartment by now with his sample bags and his terrible jokes, probably still awake, probably still turning over what she had told him that morning.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_03: For years he had been saying it to anybody who would listen.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_03: One of these days, we're going to bring home something nobody can cure.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: Bring home.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_03: That was the whole picture he carried in his head.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it was the whole picture she carried in hers.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: And it was the reason every swab in this building was taken on the way in.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_03: She decided he could have one more night of not knowing.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: He had earned it.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_03: Most of them had.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: She took the notebook out from under the tax forms, found the first clean line, and wrote.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: October 11th, World 295, dial 4.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_03: Influenza AH1, 2009.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: Hours.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_03: Carried out, not in.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: Exposed.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: One engineer, about 70, two hours in a cab.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_03: One fireman, young, a railroad town on a main line.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_03: Outcome.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: She looked at that last word for a long time.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_03: Then she capped her pen and left the line empty.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: For 11 years, every entry in the notebook had been something trying to get in.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_03: This was the first that had gone the other way through the door.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_03: And she had a feeling, putting the notebook back where it lived, that the last line would stay empty a long time.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe until somebody went back and looked.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe forever.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: She turned off the lamp and sat in the dark.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: Behind the wall that Walt had bought as furniture, the air handlers went on pulling the air out of four empty rooms and pushing it through the filters so that nothing in here would ever get out into the world.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: Every filter in the building had been built to protect one world.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_03: In 11 years, she had never once asked which one.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_03: There was no crossing this week.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_03: Released from quarantine, one pint of peach preserves and one lump of Rock Springs coal.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_03: Return odds at dial two.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: One hit in 11 tries, about 9%.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_03: At dial four, one reading from World 295.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: And for the first time, nobody at the survey is sure they want it to hold.