Ben won’t say yes or no if you ask him a question. It doesn’t matter, though. I think the TV people probably stopped showing my picture a long time ago. I was just a little kid when my family got sick. I’ve been here four whole years!
Oh, I almost forgot. Veronica isn’t back yet.
November 7 I have been staring at my Dan Marino picture all day, and I think the handwriting on the autograph looks like Dr. Ben’s. But I’m afraid to ask anyone about that. Oh, yeah-and yesterday the power was off in my room for a whole day! Same old same old. That’s what Ms. M. would say.
November 12 Ms. Manigat is teaching me a little bit about medicine. I told her I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and she said she thinks that’s a wonderful idea because she believes people will always need doctors.
She says I will be in a good position to help people, and I asked her if that’s because I have been here so long, and she said yes.
The first thing she taught me is about diseases. She says in the old days, a long time ago, diseases like typhoid used to kill a lot of people because of unsanitary conditions and dirty drinking water, but people got smarter and doctors found drugs to cure it, so diseases didn’t kill people as much anymore. Doctors are always trying to stay a step ahead of disease, Ms. Manigat says.
But sometimes they can’t. Sometimes a new disease comes. Or, maybe it’s not a new disease, but an old disease that has been hidden for a long time until something brings it out in the open. She said that’s how nature balances the planet, because as soon as doctors find cures for one thing, there is always something new. Dr. Ben says my disease is new. There is a long name for it I can’t remember how to spell, but most of the time people here call it Virus-J.
In a way, see, it’s named after me. That’s what Dr. Ben said. But I don’t like that.
Ms. Manigat said after my dad came home, the virus got in my body and attacked me just like everyone else, so I got really, really sick for a lot of days. Then, I thought I was completely better. I stopped feeling bad at all. But the virus was already in my brother and my mom and dad, and even our doctor from before, Dr. Wolfe, and Ms. Manigat says it was veryaggressive, which means doctors didn’t know how to kill it.
Everybody wears yellow plastic suits and airtight masks when they’re in my room because the virus is still in the air, and it’s in my blood, and it’s on my plates and cups whenever I finish eating. They call the suits hot suits because the virus ishot in my room. Not hot like fire, but dangerous.
Ms. Manigat says Virus-J is extra special in my body because even though I’m not sick anymore, except for when I feel like I have a temperature and I have to lie down sometimes, the virus won’t go away. I can make other people sick even when I feel fine, so she said that makes me a carrier. Ms. Manigat said Dr. Ben doesn’t know anybody else who’s gotten well except for me.
Oh, except maybe there are some little girls in China. Veronica told me once there were some little girls in China the same age as me who didn’t get sick either. But when I asked Dr. Ben, he said he didn’t know if it was true. And Ms. Manigat told me it might have been true once, but those girls might not be alive anymore. I asked her if they died of Virus-J, and she said no, no, no. Three times. She told me to forget all about any little girls in China. Almost like she was mad.
I’m the only one like me she knows about for sure, she says. The only one left.
That’s why I’m here, she says. But I already knew that part. When I was little, Dr. Ben told me about antibodies and stuff in my blood, and he said the reason him and Rene and Veronica and all the other doctors take so much blood from me all the time, until they make purple bruises on my arms and I feel dizzy, is so they can try to help other people get well, too. I have had almost ten surgeries since I have been here. I think they have even taken out parts of me, but I’m not really sure. I look the same on the outside, but I feel different on the inside. I had surgery on my belly a year ago, and sometimes when I’m climbing the play-rope hanging from the ceiling in my room, I feel like it hasn’t healed right, like I’m still cut open. Ms. Manigat says that’s only in my mind. But it really hurts! I don’t hate anything like I hate operations. I wonder if that’s what happened to the other little girls, if they kept getting cut up and cut up until they died. Anyway, it’s been a year since I had any operations. I keep telling Dr. Ben they can have as much blood as they want, but I don’t want anymore operations, please.
Dr. Ben said there’s nobody in the world better than me to make people well, if only they can figure out how. Ms. Manigat says the same thing. That makes me feel a little better about Virus-J.
I was happy Ms. Manigat told me all about disease, because I don’t want her to treat me like a baby the way everybody else does. That’s what I always tell her. I like to know things.
I didn’t even cry when she told me Veronica died. Maybe I got all my crying over with in the beginning, because I figured out a long time ago nobody gets better once they get sick. Nobody except for me.
November 14 Today, I asked Ms. Manigat how many people have Virus-J.
“Oh, Jay, I don’t know,” she said. I don’t think she was in the mood to talk about disease.
“Just guess,” I said.
Ms. Manigat thought for a long time. Then she opened her notebook and began drawing lines and boxes for me to see. Her picture looked like the tiny brown lines all over an oak-tree leaf. We had a tree called a live oak in our backyard, and my dad said it was more than a hundred years old. He said trees sometimes live longer than people do. And he was right, because I’m sure that tree is still standing in our yard even though my whole family is gone.
“This is how it goes, Jay,” Ms. Manigat said, showing me with her pencil-tip how one line branched down to the next. “People are giving it to each other. They don’t usually know they’re sick for two weeks, and by then they’ve passed it to a lot of other people. By now, it’s already been here four years, so the same thing that happened to your family is happening to a lot of families.”
“How many families?” I asked again. I tried to think of the biggest number I could. “A million?”
Ms. Manigat shrugged just like Dr. Ben would. Maybe that meant yes.
I couldn’t imagine a million families, so I asked Ms. Manigat if it happened to her family, too, if maybe she had a husband and kids and they got sick. But she said no, she was never married. I guess that’s true, because Ms. Manigat doesn’t look that old. She won’t tell me her age, but she’s in her twenties, I think. Ms. Manigat smiled at me, even though her eyes weren’t happy.
“My parents were in Miami, and they got it right away,” Ms. Manigat said. “Then my sister and nieces came to visit them from Haiti, and they got it, too. I was away working when it happened, and that’s why I’m still here.”
Ms. Manigat never told me that before.
My family lived in Miami Beach. My dad said our house was too small-I had to share a room with my brother- but my mother liked where we lived because our building was six blocks from the ocean. My mother said the ocean can heal anything. But that can’t be true, can it?
My mother wouldn’t like it where I am, because there is no ocean and no windows neither. I wondered if Ms. Manigat’s parents knew someone who worked on an oil rig, too, but probably not. Probably they got it from my dad and me.
“Ms. Manigat,” I said, “Maybe you should move inside like Dr. Ben and everybody else.”
“Oh, Jay,” Ms. Manigat said, like she was trying to sound cheerful. “Little old man, if I were that scared of anything, why would I be in here teaching you?”
She said sheasked to be my teacher, which I didn’t know. I said I thought her boss was making her do it, and she said she didn’t have a boss. No one sent her. She wanted to come.
“Just to meet me?” I asked her.
“Yes, because I saw your face on television, and you looked to me like a one of-a-kind,” she said. She said she was a nurse before, and she used to work with Dr. Ben in his office in Atlanta. She said they worked at the CDC, which is a place that studies diseases. And he knew her, so that was why he let her come teach me.
“A boy like you needs his education. He needs to know how to face life outside,” she said.
Ms. Manigat is funny like that. Sometimes she’ll quit the regular lesson about presidents and the Ten Commandments and teach me something like how to sew and how to tell plants you eat from plants you don’t, and stuff. Like, I remember when she brought a basket with real fruits and vegetables in it, fresh.
She said she has a garden where she lives on the outside, close to here. She said one of the reasons she won’t move inside is because she loves her garden so much, and she doesn’t want to leave it.
The stuff she brought was not very interesting to look at. She showed me some cassava, which looked like a
