Absence of Faith (30 page)

He deplaned into the waiting area
and scanned the crowd for Carson. After several minutes, he grew
tired of looking for his friend and went to the coffee shop. He
ordered a coffee and drank it black so that he could experience the
total taste of the beverage. He had just started drinking his
coffee black and discovered it was a whole new beverage. The tiny
airport shop was warm and steamy, but the atmosphere was
electrified with the bustle of people coming and going. Frank did
not notice the flurry as he stared into his cup at the black shiny
surface. He thought about an investigative strategy he would use in
search of the virus that he thought was causing the Hellfire
Syndrome. He never let distractions cloud his thought processes or
his goals in life. He believed that most people never achieved what
they really wanted in life because of too many distractions. Ever
since he realized that he wanted to study disease and find its
cause and hopefully a cure, he focused his energies on doing just
that. Like most people, a chain of circumstances kept getting in
his way, but he did not allow them to stop him. He did not let
people persuade him to do something different like Aunt Sophie, his
mother's sister, who kept telling his mother that pathology was a
waste of time.

"He should be a surgeon or a
gynecologist, open an office on Park Avenue, make lots of money.
Saul has friends; Saul can call Jerry. Jerry can set him up," she
would tell his mother in a sharp telltale accent that revealed her
Long Island roots.

"No. The boy does what he wants,
Sophie. I can't control him," his mother would reply.

"He's gonna be a pauper. What nice
Jewish girl is gonna marry him? You tell me?"

"Maybe, he won't marry a nice
Jewish girl?"

"Marry a gentile! Oy vay, I don't
know what these kids are coming to these days," Aunt Sophie would
say.

"They don't think like we did. They
think for themselves."

"Drink your tea. Drink your tea. I
don't want to hear this anymore! Saul, call Jerry! Jerry's a good
friend."

Saul was in the other room talking
with Frank's father and watching a football game. He never
responded.

Frank turned and searched the
crowds again.

"Carson! Carson! Over here!" he
yelled waving his hand high over his head.

Carson worked his way through the
moving crowd zigzagging like a pinball until he reached Frank and
his smiling face.

"Good to see you, old buddy!" Frank
said.

The two friends hugged.

"What's the matter? You look
terrible!" Frank said.

Carson's face drooped as if it were
made of melting wax and the dark circles under his eyes revealed
his deep pain.

"Has it gotten that
bad?"

"Yes and no. Maybe you can help me
end this craziness. Come on. Your baggage is downstairs. I'll fill
you in on the way home."

"Well, I'm glad I got your message
and I was able to convince my boss that we may have a level 2
emergency."

Carson was silent as they loaded
Frank’s luggage into the trunk of Carson’s car. They drove out of
the underground parking deck into the black, wet night.

"So what's going on?" Frank asked
as they sped onto the New Jersey Turnpike heading south.

"You remember talking with Doctor
Stokes?"

"Oh, yeah. I spoke with him a few
days ago," Frank said. "Oh no! Don't tell me he died,
too?"

"No. His wife did."

"Of the disease?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, how awful," Frank
said.

"He's taken it pretty badly. He's
organizing the town into a fanatical religious group and he's
attracted all the crazies. Worst part is that he's lost all his
better judgment as a doctor - he no longer believes it's a disease;
he believes it’s the work of the devil."

"Gee, he's lost the faith," Frank
said as they passed the towering distillation columns that lit up
the sky over the Elizabeth City oil refinery. The columns distilled
crude oil into various petroleum-based products like heating oil,
gasoline, and jet fuel.

"More like he's embraced it,"
Carson said.

Frank appeared distracted and
looked at the decaying factories harnessed by rusting chain-link
fencing.

"You don't understand. Stokes is
very influential in Ocean Village. He's like the mayor, the police
force, the council, and the social conscience of the town all in
one. Remember that commercial? 'When EF Hutton speaks...people
listen.' That's Stokes. I just got a bad feeling about him going
around reading from the Bible and making people crazy. He won’t
even talk to me anymore. How do you think the hospital is going to
react to us?"

"How is it supposed to act?" Frank
said. "I think you're being a little paranoid, Carson. Do you
honestly think an entire hospital is going to believe one doctor
claiming that all the deaths are the work of Satan?"

Carson looked at him straight in
the eye and said, "Yes. You don't know this town."

Frank was silent a few moments.
"I'll have to see it to believe it."

"You would take a pathologist's
viewpoint. What are you from Missouri - the show me state?" Carson
said to lighten the troubled look on Frank's face.

"Yeah, that's me."

"Well, I'll show you," Carson said.
"You haven't seen the effect this disease has on
people."

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
Didn't it happen to you? How come you didn't turn into a religious
fanatic, quoting the Bible every five minutes?"

"I'm a doctor. Even though the
experience was as real as sitting here talking with you, I know it
was a hallucination. I don't really believe I was in hell, but it
was scary. My worse nightmare came to life there, but I know I was
never there. These people still fear God. It's their whole life.
They live and breathe religion - they come from the old schools.
Most of them are much older than our parents. They were raised to
fear God, and when something like this happens to them, they really
believe it," Carson said changing lanes for Exit 11. "They are the
generation that believes everything they read in the papers. We
don't read the papers - we watch CNN or browse the Internet and
then we take everything with a grain a salt."

"Are you sure?"

"No."

"No? What do you mean?" Frank
said.

"I sometimes tend to side with
them. I lose confidence in myself and slip into believing it really
is an evil force causing all this madness, especially when we can't
find what's causing it."

"There's got to be an explanation,"
Frank said. "Remember Legionnaires' disease? Everyone was panicking
because they couldn't find a reason for all these men getting sick
and dying. Mankind has been battling infectious diseases for
centuries, and this won't be the end of it. Today, we have the West
Nile virus and the pandemic bird flu - 150 years ago, it was
influenza, in the 1920s it was diphtheria, in 1952 it was polio,
and now it’s the Hellfire Syndrome. When was the last time you
heard of someone dying of polio or TB in the United States? It's
rare. Most of us will never know the panic and worry people
suffered back then when everyone seemed to be dying of the flu or
suffering from polio. It's the same today with AIDS. People assume
we have all these great cures and preventative vaccines. But, new
diseases develop everyday and they will always develop and we don't
always have a cure or an idea of what causes them. A disease could
develop and wipe out the entire human race someday."

"Boy, you sure are
optimistic."

"I'm only making a point that new
diseases pop up every day. Have you ever heard of NORD, the
National Organization for Rare Disorders and orphan diseases?"
Frank said.

"Of course. But what does it do
exactly?"

"NORD is an informal coalition of
small voluntary health agencies and individuals affected by orphan
diseases. It was formed to get the Orphan Drug Act passed," Frank
explained.

"Now, I remember studying it,"
Carson said.

"It’s any disease that affects
fewer than 200,000 Americans. There are more than 6,000 such
afflictions such as Tay Sach's disease, Huntington's, Cystic
Fibrosis, and Multiple Sclerosis. The Hellfire Syndrome certainly
fits into this category. NORD helped get the Orphan Drug Act passed
in Congress that requires government to offer drug companies
incentives to develop and market orphan drugs, otherwise, they
wouldn't do it because there's no profit in orphan drugs. Look at
it this way. If you manufactured Valium, you're producing quite a
bit of it and making a good profit. Then someone comes along and
says they need such and such a drug, but they need only enough for
one thousand patients. You find that it costs ten times the amount
to manufacture a thousand doses. Would you make the
drug?"

Carson put on his directional
signal for Exit 11.

"That's typical of them. If there's
no profit in it why bother to develop drugs that save lives or cure
diseases," Carson said.

"And I've seen many good doctors
bought off by the drug companies," Frank said.

"What are you talking
about?"

"Just that. The drug companies are
very powerful and they have deep pockets. They offer many
incentives for doctors to push their drugs on patients, even if the
patient doesn't really need it. I'm talking about weekends in Palm
Springs, Las Vegas, special discounts, junkets, all kinds of fringe
benefits," Frank explained. "I even heard of one company putting a
down payment on a house that a doctor wanted."

"Are you talking fact or fiction
here?" Carson asked.

"Fact."

"Well, it won't happen to me. I'm
not going to be caught up in that shit. I didn't become a doctor
for the money. I became a doctor because I really want to help
people. Sure, the money is nice, but that's not my sole motivation.
That's why I chose Ocean Village. I've had offers from Boston,
Philadelphia and New York at triple the salary, but I took Ocean
Village because I believe the people there really need me," Carson
said. "Besides, I wanted to live by the ocean."

"You're a rare bird, Carson," Frank
said.

"I hope so for the sake of our
profession. It has a bad enough rep as it is. I hope our generation
changes things," Carson added.

"I hope so, too."

Carson approached the tollbooth,
paid the toll, and headed left towards Route 9 south. After three
miles, signs for the Garden State Parkway appeared and Carson got
in the right lane to take the exit south.

"So where do I set up shop?" Frank
asked.

"In the lab. I've cleared it
already with Dr. Hansen. He's the one that offered me the
partnership," Carson said glancing over at Frank. "It's a brand new
facility with state-of-the-art equipment and a new high speed
Internet based program, which links all member labs, and all
university and research center databases including the
CDC.

"Really? I haven't heard anything
about it," Frank added.

"That's because it's not launched
yet. We are one of the first labs to test it. You simply fill out a
web site and it matches your data to all known cases and research.
You get to see what's out there from some of the largest research
centers and universities," Carson said.

Frank looked out at the tall
overgrown grass on the side of highway rushing past in a blur of
green.

"Isn't Stokes a partner in the lab?
You think he’ll allow it now that he's...you know?" Frank said
twirling his index finger by his ear.

"He doesn't have much say in it.
He's not one of the partners, just an investor. Hansen has the
controlling interest," Carson explained. "I just can't understand
Stokes. He and I were like partners in this, now he's a religious
nut and turned against me."

"It's an absence of faith," Frank
said.

A
warm
breeze whipped Doctor Matthew Stokes' face as he sat in a wicker
chair on the screened-in porch in the rear of his house staring at
the tree where Mary had died. He kept telling himself of how
peaceful it was for her to die at her favorite place. A tear formed
in his left eye, and cascaded down his face and another was about
to make the plunge when the chimes of his doorbell sounded. He
quickly wiped his eyes and got up. He still held the snifter with a
splash of Remy Martin sloshing around when he opened the door to a
white-hair man with a face of wrinkles and ice blue
eyes.

"Hello Homer. Come on in," Stokes
said opening the door.

The man nodded and sheepishly
entered.

"What can I do for you?" Stokes
said.

"I was thinking. Maybe we should
form a group to fight these devil worshippers. Run them out and
maybe people will stop dying and going to hell," he explained.
"People will rest better without them."

"Homer, let's sit out on the deck
and talk." Stokes said. "You want something to drink?"