“It’s bad and getting worse.” Watermere seemed under no compunction to withhold any information. “Two days ago, fella over in Glen Burnie, black fella, went for a stroll along the Cromwell Station light-rail tracks. Witnesses said he was raving, having a conversation—heck, an argument—with himself. Nose was bleeding, eyes looking all goofy in his head. When the train appeared, a few folks tried to get him off the track. He refused to go. Then he turns to the train and just, well . . . kinda opens his arms as if to embrace it.”
David said, “Jesus.”
“Was a mess, that one,” Watermere said with a grunt. There was a spot of mustard on his loosened necktie. “They get trapped in these hallucinations, you know? I mean, you hear about it on the news, sure, but you really don’t get what it’s like till you see it. Or see the aftermath of it.”
“Aren’t you afraid you might be exposing yourself to it, dealing with all these sick people?”
“Way I hear it, we’re all fucked. If it’s in the air, it’s in the air. I suppose there’s a chance it’s by touch, by . . . what’s it . . . proximity? I mean, anything’s possible. But I don’t think that’s the case, tell you the truth.”
“No?”
Watermere leaned over the table, closing the distance between them. The pungent aroma of his aftershave caused David’s eyes to water. “You wanna hear something really fucked up?” said Watermere. “Something that tells me humanity is doomed?”
“Okay.”
“I got a brother-in-law works as a prison guard at the correctional facility over in Cumberland,” Watermere said. “That’s the federal joint. They got a wing of inmates there done some heinous things, Mr. Arlen, and these guys, they don’t get visitors, or letters, or the occasional romp in the fuck-shed, if you catch my meaning. Other than the prison guards and the other fellas who share that wing, they get exactly zero contact with the outside world. Total isolation. Yet I heard from my brother-in-law that about three or four months ago, these guys start exhibiting symptoms of Wanderer’s Folly. At first, the guards didn’t know what to make of it. Most of these guys are nut-balls to begin with, so how can you tell when they’re hallucinating, right?” Here, Watermere tapped his temple, as if to illustrate where all the crazy was housed. “But then things got worse. One fella, he chewed right through one of his wrists until he fully amputated his hand. Another guy actually pushed his skull through the bars of his cell. Killed himself, in other words. A bunch of the others just curl up in a corner of their cell, whimper like kids who’ve been spanked for spilling a glass of milk.”
“They’re all sick,” David said.
“Yep,” said Watermere. “Prison doctor confirmed it with blood tests. And they all died a couple of weeks later. Hemorrhages, embolisms, aneurysms—whatever it is. But what I’m saying is, they’d been isolated. And none of the prison guards had any symptoms or ever got sick. No one was carrying the sickness to ’em, in other words. Yet here they are, these jailbird monsters, getting sick and droppin’ dead jus’ like the rest of us.”
At that moment, Watermere was overcome by a coughing jag so profound it sounded painful. Still sputtering, he produced a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his sports coat and covered his mouth with it. When he finished, his eyes red and leaky, a timorous smile curling up the corners of his otherwise humorless mouth, the detective said, “Coughin’ ain’t a symptom of the Folly. That’s the emphysema.” Then he laughed, an aggravated explosion that started in his belly and volcanoed out through his gaping, spit-flecked lips. Then the laugh transitioned into another coughing fit that, once more, caused David to imagine a bottle of Listerine in Detective Watermere’s bathroom filled with granulated bits of gravel.
After the interview with Watermere, David met Burt Langstrom for lunch at the campus cafeteria. David relayed to Burt what the detective had told him about the prison, and Burt just nodded and looked mostly down at his food.
“What’s wrong?” David said.
Burt looked up. The smile that appeared on his face wasn’t just false: It was terrifying. “Nothing, David,” he said.
“Hey, man, it’s cool if you’re shaken up. I’m shaken up, too. Every time I close my eyes I can see that poor kid . . .”
“I don’t like this,” Burt said.
“What’s that?”
“Any of this.” He sat back in his chair and glanced around the cafeteria. It was mostly empty, which was rare for this time of day. The only noise came from the TVs bracketed to the walls and the clanging of pots and pans from the kitchen. “I’m uncomfortable here. Anyway, I heard it’s only a matter of time before they shut things down completely.”
“You mean here at the college? That’s just a rumor.”