Word Count: 15,075

                The microscope was indeed broken, but on top of that one of the tissue samples that had been on a small slide inside the microscope had fallen, and I had no idea where it had slid to, or if the slide had opened and exposed everybody to contamination. With Shane gone it was difficult to work on his tissue samples alone, and I often resorted to using my patient’s rooms to examine the cells. In that case I’d been using an old-fashioned light microscope that I bought in the city, and it wasn’t cheap. I had to go back to the city to get another one, and I made to sure to lock up the microscope slide in the freezer with the rest of the Petri dishes that had Shane’s other samples on them. I set out for the city immediately to pick up a new microscope, not even thinking to wash my hands. A foolish mistake.

                I passed by my luncheon painting as I exited. It spoke confidence to me, and I was proud to have the copy of it in my kitchen. It told me that the city was not a place of overwhelming fear and clutter, but that some creative people had simply chosen to organize their lives in a different way than I had. As much as I hated the urban environment, it seemed like I would be able to call it home for one trip. The funny thing was that it was never far away, because this small hospital was always on the border. The click of my car’s doors and the ignition did not bother me, and I left the sub-suburb behind. It was not long before I could see the great cityscape, the land of microscopes, endless roads, winding shops and a larger population than a normal man could comprehend. My car passed over the bridge to the city – there was a large river blocking the path – but it was not a smooth voyage. In the middle of the trip the car struck a large pothole, and everything in the car shook. Thankfully my car was okay (what a privilege it was to care about a car of all things!), but I was shaken.

                In the mirror, I saw my eyes. I saw the same fire within them as I had seen in Shane’s, but my eyes lacked courage. The city was close approaching. Soon, I was within urban borders.

                I didn’t remember where I’d bought my old microscope, but I knew the area slightly well enough to find the store again. It was no small place, either. In fact, it was a towering building with a large, lit sign indicating the name of the store. The logo was red and white, I remembered that much. How many red and white logos on skyscrapers could there be in a single city? And so, it didn’t take me long to find the store, even though it did take quite a bit of time to park. I ended up parking in a large garage about one block away from the store’s building. Once on the sidewalks I noticed that the clicking was back, but it was not just from cars – it was all around me, the noise of the city. My face contorted. I knew I looked as though I were about to question something or somebody – perhaps I would quiz the city on why its sounds annoyed me so much.

                The noises were followed by more noises within the store, but these were not noises of the city. Curious, I walked to wear the strange sounds came from, and was lead to a room near the back to the store. I passed by the microscopes without picking one up. It seemed as though the noises had only begun as soon as I entered the building; they were so loud that it would have been hard not to hear them, even from outside.

                There were multiple people. They were screaming. One was banging on the walls, on metal shelves nearby, on anything he could find. It seemed to be a storage warehouse that I had walked into, and was probably a room I was not allowed to enter. But, as a doctor, I was perpetually curious – especially since my encounter with Shane – and could not resist learning the cause of this horrible fuss. When I looked, I saw two grown men in warehouse uniform weeping over the body of a coworker, or who I assumed was a coworker. The coworker’s body was not moving, but had been turned upright. It was skinny, but not slender as Shane’s dead body had been. The man was also much, much younger, and appeared younger than I was. If anything had happened to this man, it was the most unfortunate accident I’d seen in a while. I ran in to ensure that the situation was under control.

                “What’s going on here?” I inquired.

                “It’s him,” sobbed one of the men. “He collapsed, we don’t know how long ago. We just found him like this!” His voice sounded slightly defensive. I told him to calm down, and tell me what he knew about the collapsed man’s condition. The other man answered in his stead when words escaped him.

                “He’s  dead, sir.” The man brushed his uniform with his hands, and repeated the motion several times. “What my friend here is saying is that we found him here – no pulse, no anything – but we don’t know how long his body’s been like that. We flipped him over so that… so that… well, we think it’s an improvement over his previous placement, flat on his face.” As he formed the last sentence, his face too contorted like mine. Perhaps this was why he never commented on my raised eyebrow. Although I looked permanently ready to throw question upon question at them, they wanted exactly that. They wanted nothing more than to talk endlessly about the death of their friend.

                “Just give me a moment. I’m a doctor, so I can help you out if there’s still something I can do.” I said. I knelt down and felt the dead man’s rough, hard skin. He was surely gone from Earth, there was no doubt. But no blood, no markings. He didn’t seem like the type to have a heart attack, but I didn’t know his medical history well enough. I brushed some of his short golden hair aside looking for any distinguishing marks, but found nothing. All that I was able to find was the lack of a pulse. “Okay, I need you two to do me a huge favor. First, cry as much as you need to - he is dead.” And they cried, and one of them banged on the walls and the metallic warehouse shelves while screaming “I knew it!” “Next, I’ll need a minute to look at his body so that I can take this case back to the hospital where I work. If something is strange, you can notify his family and I’ll have people come here as quickly as possible to pick this man up.” They were still sobbing hysterically, screaming with such intensity that I feared the sound waves might break the microscope I was about to purchase.

                I waited as long as it took for the two of them to become more silent, and then told them to walk away from that place – walk very far away, and continue normal work for a while. They nodded and walked away into the depths of the warehouse. The caves of merchandise and cardboard boxes went on farther than I’d thought. The two were able to walk straight for quite a while before turning a corridor and disappearing from my view. I turned and looked back at the dead worker. Shane’s case had made me afraid of death, and I was not yet ready to face it head on, especially in a strange warehouse and not in the hospital. I left him there to go purchase my microscope, hoping that I would know how to deal with the situation when I returned. The body was still cold. He’d been dead for hours, and if nobody passed by this area he could have been dead for days. Not a soul would have noticed if he was face down next to a bunch of boxes because the uniform color blended in so well with the cardboard.

                It took a while, but I found a compound monocular microscope of similar quality to the one I had been using. The newer model was smaller, and much lighter. I purchased it without thinking twice, but also spoke without thinking twice. “Did you see the man in the warehouse?” I told the cashier. Of course they hadn’t, and naturally they were eager to see. I managed to refuse the cashier while I paid for the microscope – still a hefty sum, even after all these years – but once it was paid for there was no stopping the man from leaving his post to explore the warehouse. I followed him, begging him not to look, regretting that I had let loose those horrible eight words. To him, those eight words were delightful – something had happened. To me, knowing that something happened usually meant knowing that something bad happened. When we arrived in the warehouse I pointed out where the man’s body lay, but there was no man. We found the corpse stacking crates ten meters away. I spun around – was my entire perception of the world falling apart in a single month?

                The man was dead, but there he was, alive and stacking crates! He looked perfectly healthy, too.

                “Thanks for this. I learned a lot,” said the cashier to me. He turned around and walked away, but I remained where I was. It was not possible for this dead man to pick himself up and walk around as though nothing happened. Something happened. I acknowledged it, and this now-living man’s two coworkers had acknowledged it. Furthermore I felt that this man had acknowledged it by dying, a state I believed was very difficult to fake in person. I examined him closely without letting him know that I was watching him. I must have watched him for twenty minutes, looking for a sign that he was not human, not of this Earth. Perhaps in those twenty minutes I would see his ghost fly out of the lifeless cadaver, leaving it to rot before soaring into heaven, but the ghost did never come, and the man never showed signs of dying.

                I held my microscope tight against my chest and exited the store, not looking back at the now living man. I wanted to forget what I saw and continue on with a normal life, as I’d told those two workers to do. The city lights and sounds were intimidating now, although a mere few hours ago they had been refreshing. Even to this day I cannot find solace in an urban environment. It must be a certain genetic code that creates a man who is resistant to the city air, the city structure, the city life, much like it is a certain genetic code that makes a strain of bacteria resistant to penicillin.

                As I sat in the driver’s seat of my car, I felt a gradual crunching noise. I had sat on something, I assumed, that bounced around after I hit the pothole. When I reached under myself to feel what it was I sat on, I felt a sharp pang of pain. My finger showed blood – and a shard of embedded glass. I carefully pulled it out and looked at what I had crushed. It was a microscope slide. More specifically, it was the tissue sample that had been under the microscope when it broke, and that I afterwards put in a freezer for safe keeping.  And the shards hadn’t all been on the seat. Most of the slide shards were in my back pocket; only a few glass pieces were strewn across the seat. They had fallen out of my pocket.

                That idiotic patient of mine! First he broke my microscope, and then slips my tissue samples into my pocket. I feared now for my own health, because I knew that the strange new bacteria I’d discovered earlier were on that slide. There was no way to circumvent the reality of their infectious nature now; the bacteria had infected me. It was impossible to remain free of infection when I knew that some glass shards had pierced by skin and made me bleed. If they did not get in through a direct route via the glass, they might have used the air and entered through the open wounds. I was more than frightened now, and beyond terrified, so scared that I could not help but act calmly. I did not move, only slowly brushed the shards away onto the parking lot floor below my car. I placed the shards were nobody would run them over, and pulled out of the parking garage. I drove home in silence, afraid that merely speaking might instigate some strange biological reaction.

                Meanwhile, the hospital continued to fare worse and worse. More staff fell ill, and I spent much of my time visiting Shane and inquiring how his treatments had been working out. He was hesitant to discuss results with me. “Didn’t you say you’d contact me in a month?” he would ask. I knew he was simply annoyed that I cared so much about his condition – even though I was really cared about my own – but I told him that I was genuinely concerned whether or not the emecillin was working, which was the truth anyway.

                “I know you’re concerned,” he said, “but I’m not a child. I appreciate that you call, and appreciate it ever more than you show up at my door, but it’s not necessary. I’m in the best shape of my life. I don’t think I even need these stitches anymore!”

                “That’s preposterous,” I said. “You keep those stitches in for a good, long while. We can’t have you falling apart.” I knew he wouldn’t fall apart if I took the stitches out. I had a feeling he was healing fast, faster than a normal human should. Was it a side effect of the bacteria? I had many more agar plates waiting for me at the hospital, but no test subjects. I wished desperately for a miracle volunteer prepared to lose their life for my research, but my wishes were never granted. Wishes rarely are.

                I placed my new microscope in a completely open room, and moved my Petri dishes to the refrigerator in that room, which were beginning to show their age. I contemplated creating new dishes from the overgrown cultures but decided against it – I was far too tired at that late hour, having just returned from the city and also having suffered glass wounds and bacterial infections. I was prepared for only one activity: Sleep. I wanted to sleep through the days and the months, through my late lunches and through the durations of my patients’ illnesses. I wanted to make the painting above my dinner seat look young with the years I passed by sleeping. So I shut the refrigerator door after looking at the white mounds of bacteria resting on the plastic gel-filled plates and let out the lights in the room. My new microscope was plugged into the wall, but the revealing light was not on. A moment ago the room had been filled with life; without me, without the bacteria peeking out from their frozen homes, the room was as lifeless as that warehouse worker’s body had been. I will swear on my longevity that the man had been dead.

                I ate dinner under the kitchen painting again, but this time I felt worthy of more than a frozen meal. I worked up the courage to create a small pasta dish, but having touched the dry pasta with my hands I skeptically felt it unsafe to eat. I went to bed hungry, feeling sorry for Midas, who went to bed hungry every night, and feeling worried that I might be going hungry for quite a while. That night I dreamt of a vast forest, untouched by man or animal. I saw only vegetative life, extending to the edges of the continents and into the sea. The trees worked their way down into the ocean, where the forests continued as kelp. Rays of light escaped from the trees, which glowed bright neon green in the presence of the sun. It was warm and refreshing, and made me feel complete. I walked to the edge of the continent seeking the ocean and the end of the forests. I got what I deserved – upon touching the white capped water the forests turned to dust, the land to a desolate plain. The oceans evaporated, and I looked at a real-life representation of the map of the Earth without oceans. But was the view of the world’s tallest undersea mountains worth the price? Behind the ocean and me were the remains of a once beautiful and endless paradise of trees and life. Now it was burned to the ground – I could see smoke rising from cracks in the mud. Walking to the oceans I had stepped in mud, but even the mud upon my dreamy shoes was dried and charred.

                My clock read 3:17am when I awoke that morning. I fluffed my pillow and slept once more, half afraid to set my head upon an object that my hands had worked their contaminated grooves around. I awoke again at 3:43am, and again at 4:20am. A new pattern of waking and sleeping developed within me in just a single night. However, I was not exhausted the next day. In fact, I felt refreshed and ready for the new sun.

                But the hospital that day was just as mundane as usual. Luckily the patient yesterday had been so disruptive that he was relocated to another wing of the hospital, and was now out of my care. As soon as he was gone I received a new patient whose condition I felt was remarkably similar to Shane Evans’s. I began to scrape off tissue samples from the unconscious woman, onto to find that she had none of the strange white bacteria on her skin. Part of me hoped to find another case, so that my miracle volunteer wouldn’t be quite so voluntary, yet the other part wished for a healthier world where nobody would come into this bastard building. There is a cure for everything, but only if humankind can find it. The searches are often long and difficult, intertwined with fate and destiny – a person’s life is always threatened during the search for a cure. The cure could be for anything, and always is at least one man put at risk. Why was it farfetched to think that I wouldn’t be able to garner a single person to help me investigate these strange specimens?

                And I realized that it wasn’t. It wasn’t farfetched at all, because soon everybody would be clamoring to volunteer. I should say that they weren’t volunteering, because they never approached me to state the notion of their visit. They were ordinary doctors in the hospital – doctors I believed were also infected with this strange disease. It would only take a week or so to find out, I thought. Perhaps a month at most, and then I would know. I would see their weakness – it might even compare to my own weakness. I expected my case to repeat Shane’s, and I expected the same of everybody else. Not surprisingly, it was the pathologist – whose name was Victor – to be the first victim of infection. One could easily see he was weakened beyond repair as he stumbled through the hallways. He may as well have been the embodiment of all the corpses he’d dissected over the years, because that is what he looked like. He was not dead, but the very closest thing to it, and while watching him I could only think that he had been there when Shane had come back to life. He and the others that surrounded Shane’s once dead body were at the highest risk to die. I would try and recall who else was in the room that day. There was a woman – a biomedical engineer? No, a biochemist. Shanna.

                Shanna passed by me every day, but I’d never taken notice. She would walk by the painting as I ate my lunch. Of course she was far in the distance, and only came into view as she crossed the intersection between hospital wings, but I recognized the shape of her head, and the flowing of her hair. I began to watch her with the greatest intensity, just as I was monitoring Victor, waiting for the day when the symptoms would become clear, and praying that their symptoms would become threatening far before mine would.