The incident “fell into the category of a close call,” she said. In the end, she survived her encounter with Ebola only because her habit of checking her space suit for leaks enabled her to get out of the hot zone fast and remove her bloody space suit. Her narrative left me mesmerized.
There’s a useful technique for capturing important moments during an interview that I call the delayed note. When someone is saying something powerful, you don’t always want to draw attention to the fact that you’re writing down their words, because they may pull back and stop talking. So, on rare occasions, I may stop writing. I put down my notebook. I try to get a neutral expression on my face, as if I’m not that interested. Meanwhile, I’m trying to memorize exactly what the person is saying. When I sense that my short-term memory is getting full, I change the subject and ask a question that I expect will result in a dull answer. The person begins giving the dull answer, and I begin jotting delayed notes in my notebook. I’m writing down what the person said moments earlier, while I was not taking notes. (I learned this technique from John McPhee, who teaches an undergraduate writing course at Princeton University called The Literature of Fact. I had taken his course as a graduate student.) So, as Nancy Jaax began to talk about the blood in her space suit, I put down my notes and listened.
This was just the beginning of the research for a key scene in
“Where did you get that scar on your knuckle?” I asked.
“Which one? That one? That’s where a goat bit me when I was nine,” she answered, touching the scar. It had been a goat on her family’s farm in Kansas, she explained, and she could still recall how much the bite had hurt.
Deep notes can also be notes on what a person is thinking. Of course, since you can’t read minds, you have to ask people what they are thinking or were thinking. After I’ve written a passage describing a person’s stream of thoughts—a type of narrative that fiction writers refer to as interior monologue—I always fact-check it with the person later. I read the passage aloud, usually on the telephone. I ask the person, “Do these sentences accurately reflect your recollection of what was going through your mind at that moment?”
Often, the person answers, “Not exactly,” and proceeds to correct what I’ve written to make it more faithful to their own memory. If it was an especially dramatic, emotional, or terrifying moment, the person can often give a consistent account of what they were thinking and feeling. (Witnesses to crimes often don’t accurately remember the facts of what they saw—but they do remember their feelings with clarity.)
After Jaax had realized that Ebola blood was slopping around inside her space suit, she had to make an emergency exit from Level 4. She went into the air lock and stood in the chemical shower, feeling the blood squishing around on her arm and hand.
“Were you thinking you would die?” I asked her.
“No,” she replied. Instead, she had been thinking about the fact that she had forgotten to go to the bank to get money for the babysitter who was taking care of her kids that day. If she was infected with Ebola, the authorities would lock her in the Slammer, and who was going to pay the babysitter?
I don’t think a novelist would be likely to invent this. And if it appeared in a novel, it might not ring true. Yet Jaax’s account of what she was thinking is completely believable because it occurs in a nonfiction narrative. It seems to reverberate with general human truth. It is a statement about mothers, children, and death, and it cut me to the heart when I heard it. I could not have made it up.
In the bloody space-suit scene, when Nancy Jaax emerged from the chemical shower and took off her suit to examine her hand, to see if there was any Ebola blood on it, I described her hands in detail as her gloves came off. Just a couple of sentences. These sentences were the result of the long examination of her hands at her kitchen table. I mentioned the scar on her knuckle and that she’d gotten it as a girl from a goat bite at her family’s farm in Kansas. The scar was a microstory. It told the reader that Nancy Jaax was a Kansas farm girl; she was Dorothy in Level 4.
While I often take photographs to supplement my notes, I almost never use a tape recorder. Apart from the fact that a tape recorder always seems to fail when it’s most needed, the device makes the person who’s being recorded self-conscious. An interviewee will stare at the tape recorder while his or her speech becomes awkward, not like the natural, lively voice of a person in real life. Indeed, cameras and sound recorders aren’t sufficient for deep notes. No electronic recording device can capture the interplay of the human senses. For capturing sensual reality, it seems that only an old-fashioned reporter’s notebook has sufficiently advanced technology. I take notes in longhand in little spiral notebooks. They are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. I use a mechanical pencil.
TWO ARMY VIRUS RESEARCHERS walked down one of the long corridors of USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick. I had been hanging around with them that day. My shirt pocket had a magnetic security card clipped to it, with the word VISITOR on it. My shirt pocket also contained a small reporter’s notebook and a mechanical pencil. The walls of the corridor were cinder block, painted the color of sputum. Thick glass windows looked into sealed laboratory suites— Biosafety Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4. The corridor was filled with a weird, burning, moist smell. This smell, which will never leave my mind, was the odor of giant autoclaves—huge, pressurized steam ovens, full of equipment and waste from the labs, cooking the stuff at high heat and pressure, to make it sterile.
The researchers’ names will be given here as Martha and Jeremy; those are not their real names.
Jeremy glanced at Martha. “I was thinking it might be a good day for going into BL-4,” he said.
“I was thinking so, too,” she answered. She was looking at me.
Jeremy turned to me and said, casually, “Are you up for BL-4 today?”
We were standing before an inconspicuous door marked AA-5. It led to one of the Ebola suites, a group of rooms where Ebola research was actively being done. “What will we be doing in there?” I asked.
“Somebody died,” Jeremy answered ominously. “The blood samples came in the other day. We’re doing tests to try to identify any virus in the samples.”
The dead person’s identity had not been disclosed to the Army researchers. They had been told he was a “John Doe” male. He had apparently been a U.S. government employee. He might have been a soldier. Or he might have been a diplomat. Or, possibly, John Doe had worked for an intelligence agency such as the CIA. The researchers would never learn his name, the circumstances of his death, where he had died, or who his employer had been.
The Institute had relationships with various U.S. government agencies and offices. They were known as clients. The Institute’s clients included the White House, the Department of Defense, and, almost certainly, a number of intelligence agencies. The Institute performed research for its clients. Whichever client John Doe had worked for, he had died with symptoms that suggested a hot virus. His death had apparently involved tiny, starlike pools of blood under his skin, and blood might have been flowing from his orifices.
“I don’t know where the samples came from,” Jeremy said. “They didn’t tell me. Maybe the Middle East. The X virus, if it’s there, seems to be Marburg-like.”
Marburg virus is a type of Ebola that is associated with Kitum Cave, in the rain forest on the eastern side of Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano in East Africa. On at least two occasions, people who went inside Kitum Cave died shortly afterward of Marburg virus, having apparently caught the virus inside or near the cave.
“If there’s a virus in the blood samples, it’s considered a Biosafety Level 4 agent,” Jeremy continued. “This is because the guy died and because it [the putative X virus] hasn’t been identified. It’s an Unknown,” he said.
Martha swiped her ID card across a sensor, and a computer-synthesized voice issued from a speaker by the door: “RTU downloading.” There was a chime. “One moment please,” the computer said. A green light went on, and there was a click. The entry door had unlocked.
Martha went through the entry door and closed it behind her. The light over the door went from green to red.
Meanwhile, Jeremy and I waited in the corridor. Beyond the door was a locker room. Martha would take off all her clothing in the locker room and then would proceed inward through some other rooms, where she would put on her space suit and head into the Ebola zone.
In a few minutes, the light turned green again. This meant that Martha had left the locker room and had gone farther inward. Now we could enter.
Jeremy swiped his security card on a pad by the door, I swiped mine, and we entered the locker room. As we
