I found Ollie exactly where I always did: sitting in his windowless, underground box of an office. The walls were permanently stained nicotine-yellow despite that it had been decades since anyone had been allowed to smoke in the building. His credenza had been there at least as long as him but held nothing but a stack of files and a single framed picture of a kid, a young girl, and a nameplate: O. Waxman, MD. The overly bright fluorescent lighting made his comb-over look moist, like a sheen of butter on a rising loaf, and he kept pressing it flat with his palm. Each time, he’d rub the furrow under his glasses as well.
He jumped out of his chair to shut the door the moment I appeared.
“Why you chasing this?” he asked. Ollie had that typical New York brusqueness no one from New York seems to notice. It sounded more like an accusation than a question, and it was the second time in as many days that my motives had been questioned. I’m sure he could see the look on my face.
“I would hope that would be obvious.”
“So now it’s seven people,” he scoffed. “I’m sorry to be the asshole who has to say this out loud, but in a city this size, seven is nothing. You’d do more good handing out health citations to the homeless.”
He sat down and so did I. Apparently, we were gonna have another chat.
“Dr. Chalmers doesn’t think so,” I said.
“You think that’s why she approved this nonsense? Because she agrees with you?”
I scowled. I had no idea what he was implying.
“You know, we talked to your boss the other day. Your real boss. Back in Atlanta. The good Dr. Sowell.”
“And?”
“He seems to think you’re a political hire.”
“The CDC isn’t staffed by appointment.”
“No. But the people at the top answer to those who are. And Sowell seems to think you were some kind of diversity case left over from the previous administration’s hiring program.”
“He said that?”
Oliver smirked. “Not in so many words.”
“What do you want me to say, Ollie?”
“I just want to know the angle.” He nodded to the file Chalmers had given me.
“Angle? Why does everyone automatically assume this isn’t straight?”
Waxman scowled and dug in his desk for his heartburn chewables. I glanced at the remnant of a meatball sub in crumpled paper. He popped a tablet into his mouth and held the open bottle toward me. I declined.
“Yes,” I said. “I know what Sowell thinks of me. I’d love to explain why he’s wrong in very precise language, but I have a wife and a child and I can’t work a post-doc forever. And since research positions don’t exactly grow on trees and I’m not gonna get a good letter from him, my only hope is you or Dr. Chalmers. And a solid paper. Not collated stats tables, Ollie. That’s for grad students. Something original. Something that gets my name out there.”
For the past two weeks, an unfortunately large part of my job had been tabulating statistics on a new kind of food-handling program we were testing. The science was mundane. A well-trained undergraduate could have done it. That wasn’t the purpose of the field program. The field program was there to teach us how things worked in the real world. And in that, it was successful.
New York City crams a population of nine million—that’s larger than countries like Israel or Switzerland, by the way—into five small boroughs. Those boroughs sit inside a wider metropolitan area, stretching from New Jersey to Connecticut, that holds nine million more. The combined metro GDP approaches that of the entire nation of Canada. Besides the numerous mega-hospitals—each like a small town—there are a few thousand nursing homes, at least as many clinics, and countless doctors’ offices, dentists, and counselors. There’s a hairstylist and nail salon on every corner, and of course innumerable restaurants—from the five-star palaces in Midtown to the food trucks lining the parks. There are coffee shops, delis, butchers, bakeries, fishmongers, grocers, creameries, school and hospital cafeterias, packaged food manufacturers, food service suppliers, and the distributors and resellers who move it all around. And then there’s all the stuff people put in their bodies that isn’t food: pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, “alternative health” devices, prophylactics, and sexual aids, and the pharmacies and sex shops that stock them.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene was responsible for all of it. Which was impossible. It was a feat just to keep up with complaints. They had a whole consumer contact center that handled hundreds of calls and emails—thousands, in a crisis—before lunchtime. They conducted a dozen or so inspections every single day of the week—some scheduled, some by surprise. I got to go on a few. I learned two things: there is very little oversight, and health inspectors, who have roughly the same education as police officers, are at least as corrupt.
“I thought you had the Africa thing,” he said between chews.
“I was fourth author. It’s not the same and you know it.”
“And that’s it? That’s all this is, you being the A student? There’s nothing else?”
I squinted hard and took off my glasses to rub my eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“Without being out of line?” I put my glasses back.
“Spit it.”
“I just wanna know if you have this talk with the white guys who come through here.”
He stiffened. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just wondering why I’m being asked to defend my desire for employment. I’m just supposed to be happy I got a degree, is that it?”
“Whoa the fuck down. No one’s asking you to defend anything.”
I pointed with my thumb back toward the office. “Tucker spent ten days lecturing sixth graders about pertussis.”
“It wasn’t only about pertussis.”
“He got a buncha ‘attaboys.’ Not an interrogation.”
“Tucker’s smart enough to know the commissioner wants ammunition in the public relations fight with the anti-vaxxers. Public school outreach makes a nice feel-good story for the papers.”
“Tucker’s dad is a professor at Johns Hopkins,” I said. “And a former chair of the Association.”
Oliver snorted.
“Okay.” He raised his hands. “You’re right. About everything. Have at it. Your appointment’s almost up anyway. Your choice. In a couple weeks, you’re Sowell’s problem.”
The implication was clear: I wouldn’t remain Dr. Sowell’s problem for long.
“Does that mean I can stop crunching the numbers on the Farm-to-Table Program?” I asked.
“Christ.” Ollie twisted his face in disgust. “Don’t sound so broken up about it. That one happens to be mine, you know.”
I got up. “I know.” I smiled.
He got serious. “Chalmers is gonna give you enough rope to hang yourself. Just don’t hang the rest of us out with you.”
“Meaning?”
His chair creaked as he leaned back. “I get it. You see the guys with the pedigrees snatching up all the jobs and you’re wondering where that leaves you. But you’ve been after Chalmers about this thing for, what, five weeks now? In the team meeting. Where notes are kept and emailed out to everyone under the sun. And you berated her into sending out that Health Alert.”
I squinted. “Isn’t that what it’s for?”
“Fuck . . . Don’t be so naive. You ever watch the local news?”
I stood with my hand on the door. “Not if I can help it.”
“You should. If you’re serious about staying in public health. Local politics lives and dies on two things.” He held up fingers. “Crime. And health. Last year, the department was all over the local outlets for a couple weeks straight after the commissioner yanked an ad campaign, a PSA combating teen pregnancy. Placards at bus stops and subway stations and shit like that.
“The week before, one of the network affiliates asked for access to the sex worker survey data, which they thought would make a nice nightly lead and salaciously sell some advertising.” He waggled his head with the alliteration. “We said no. It’s confidential, as you know. Two days later, they ran a story critical of the PSA. Swore up and down the two were completely unrelated, that it wasn’t retaliation. Suddenly, we were flooded with calls. The mayor’s office, too. As if no one had noticed the signs plastered all over town until they were on TV.”
“They probably hadn’t,” I said.
“Exactly. Manufactured controversy. The NAACP didn’t like it because it made a young black girl the poster child for the issue. The conservatives didn’t like it because not a single ad used the word ‘abstinence.’ The liberals didn’t like it because we didn’t explicitly hold boys accountable. You know whose campaign that was?”
I shook my head.
“Chalmers,” he said. “A black woman who put herself through a PhD program while raising two kids. By herself. Didn’t matter.” He leaned over his desk again. “Let’s say you’re right and you find something. New strain of avian flu. Homeless people shitting in the reservoir. Whatever. Everything you collect could be used to suggest that an assistant director of this department repeatedly ignored warnings from her staff about a serious public health threat.” He made quotes in the air.
I scowled. I let go of the door.
Waxman saw my face. “Don’t believe me? Okay. Let me spell it out for you. You don’t get to be three rungs down from the mayor of a city this size without making enemies. Get it? There are people out there right now whose full-time job is to find ways of criticizing this administration. That’s it. That’s all they do. Lawyers. PR firms. Political mercenaries. Well-paid, too. And if they can’t find anything, they make shit up. You want a job? Don’t look up one day and find yourself on their side.”
“So . . . if I find anything, we take it to the boss first and let her run it upstairs.”
He nodded sagely. “Or into the ground.”
I looked at the man. At his well-lit comb-over. “What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“Anyone every approach you for dirt?”
“Not me.” He smiled. “I’m straight as an arrow.”
Tucker was due back that afternoon for a team session, so I skipped the office and went to a diner and asked for a booth at the back. I ordered pie and coffee and flipped through the pictures I’d taken in the grocer’s basement. I looked at the man’s stub of an arm, at his atrophied legs, at the tufts of hair that fell out of his head. I looked at the kids, foreheads together, and of course the old woman. The tips of her fingers were cracked and split. I hadn’t noticed that before. I had been too focused on the gaze, the gaze right through me, as if her ghost were still there. I’d seen that before.
I rested my chin in my palm and zoomed in. Her nails were frayed. I moved up to the symbol. Then down to the white bag. Someone had put those people in that dungeon, had given them food, and then never came back. Was that because they were already sick? Or did that come later? ICE said the doors were left open. Could someone have gone to retrieve them, found them dead, and fled? Nothing frightens people quite like disease. It’s not rational.
My pie and coffee came and I closed the photos and called my wife. Video chat. I asked to see my daughter and her big head of frizzy hair. I missed her. I missed her smell. She showed me the picture book she’d been reading with her mother. Something about a cat and a magpie. She showed me one of the pages and explained that the magpie was the black-and-white one and that it was one of the smartest animals in the world. Then she finished her sentence and without pause said “Okay, bye Daddy!” and set the phone down.
I laughed, and my wife picked it up. She was smiling, too. But it faded pretty quick.
“She can’t keep calling here.”
“I know,” I said, which was to say I knew why Marlene didn’t want her to. In my head I was thinking that my wife only had our daughter to look after and it didn’t seem crazy for her to help with her sick mother-in-law while her husband was out of town. But I didn’t want to argue.
“I get why you don’t want to tell her about everything,” she said. “But you at least have to talk to her. You can’t keep giving that job to me. It’s not fair.”
Mom had been in and out of the hospital for years. She was only 56, but then, that’s what years of drug abuse will do. She swore she was dying each and every time. She was always a lot to deal with. Especially after Cliff left, her third husband. She met him at the casino. They married after a few months and he left her four years later. I wanted to feel sorry for her, and to help, but she made it so damned hard. She was just plain mean. I didn’t mind the awful things she said to me. I was used to it. But my wife . . .
My mother slapped my daughter’s hand once. Mari was barely old enough to walk. It wasn’t hard, but it made Marlene hella mad. Her mother had been a teacher. As a kid, she didn’t get slapped. She got a “time out.” Marlene tried to be diplomatic, but Mom is so damned sensitive. She im-mediately got defensive and said some things that are hard to take back. Not that she ever tried. Half the time Mom was around, I felt like a hostage negotiator. The rest of the time, the hostage. She, on the other hand, had no problems speaking her mind, no matter the damage, and walking out the door like it was no big deal. And she’d never talk about my brother.
“Don’t you say his name!”
I went to a professional. Briefly. Before my dissertation defense. I thought talking about everything might help with my marriage. He urged me to take care of myself before anything, which was a nice way of saying I should cut Mom loose, emotionally. I just didn’t know that I could do that. To my own mother. She didn’t have anyone else. Now she was back in the hospital and calling the house every eight hours looking to guilt me into visiting. Or giving her money we didn’t have. And if it wasn’t that, it was crackpot theories about how the government was poisoning us with chemtrails, or the President was a member of the Klan, whatever.
“Please,” Marlene said from the screen.
I knew that look. I knew that voice. My phone dinged with the receipt of a new message. ALL CAPS. I had been summoned back to the office for some big announcement.
I nodded to my wife. “I hear ya. Gotta go. L—” I stopped. Almost said it. Out of habit. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.
I caught a white takeout bag out of the corner of my eye. Two tables down, it sat on its side, its bottom facing me. I walked over and asked if I could see it. The couple at the table looked at me like I was nuts, but they complied.
Black circle with the letters CE. Sold all over the city apparently. I sighed.
Strike two.