The Variola Project

 It always amazes me the stories you hear about the things people dig up in these old departments. I mean, who puts half a dead monkey into the back of a freezer and then just sort of forgets about it, until thirty years later it’s discovered by some unsuspecting graduate student? Or how about that old professor who retired from the department with a can of radioactive waste locked in a cupboard beneath his desk that sat there for ten years before someone decided to wonder why that particular cupboard was always locked? All of these stories are TRUE. I know because I heard them from other cleaners. You’ll never believe what I found though.

The department is six stories high. There are toilets on each floor that I have to do, and every other floor has been made into women’s toilets, but they never bothered to take out the urinals or anything. But as long as they’re empty I don’t really care. It’s always empty when I work because I start my shift early to avoid the students. I’m embarrassed because many of them are the same age as me, and they look down on me because they think I’m just a cleaner while they know that they are the future. One time, a Friday lunchtime, one of them asked me if I wanted to come along to the pub with him and his group. He smiled at me, KINDLY, and he had lovely dark eyes like he was wearing eyeliner. I mumbled that I was working and couldn’t take a break right then, but really I couldn’t stand the thought of him on his social equality mission, looking down at me, pitying me. After that I started coming in early to avoid them.

People in the government will probably assume my project is the work of terrorists although nothing will explode; it isn’t like a bomb. But this is because they lack imagination and no one has ever done a project like this before. That is the secret of art after all.

I’m not a real cleaner. I know I said I was a cleaner, but I’m not a REAL cleaner. Let me explain what I mean because it’s important that you understand where I’m coming from. Real cleaners, and there are lots of those here, are losers with low ambition and without the imagination to even dream of doing something with their lives. I’m not like them because I’m an artist really, it’s just so hard to get anywhere in art, because you have to come up with something original, and it’s all been done before. So I got this job cleaning because I had to, that’s all, because I needed to pay the bills, while I searched for my muse. But all of that changed the day my muse found me.

I was cleaning on the bottom floor which is underground in the lab that belongs to the guy with the dark eyes. His picture was taped above his desk. I used to stare at it sometimes, but that morning I felt nosy about him, and I opened his desk drawer and inside was a pack of photographs. I looked at them all; they were of someplace foreign or exotic like Thailand or South America or something, and there was a picture of him with his girlfriend and then I HATED HIM, because I knew for sure that really he did look down on me. So I pushed some things over on his desk, and drew on the photograph of him with a black marker and opened all his drawers. Nothing was locked. I opened his fridge to let everything go off, and then in the far corner by the filing cabinet I opened the deep freezer. Water vapour poured out into the room. I stared at the strange vials with different coloured lids before me on the front rack and read the labels to myself.

It was then that my muse appeared. She took my hand in hers, and it was thin like a ghost’s hand, and she pulled my hand into the back of the freezer. I reached around behind the boxes, some of them were frozen into place, and then right into the back where I could feel another vial, tipped on its side, not in a rack. I pulled it out. It was so cold it burned it my fingers so I clutched it in my apron to read the label. ‘Va*iol*’. I squinted at the label while my stomach tightened with excitement. It whispered at me and in my mind I filled in the missing letters that had faded away in the deep freeze: ‘Variola’. And then I knew that I had discovered my future. An art project that was all mine – that no one had ever done before.

I took the vial home in my cleaner’s apron. I defrosted it in my fridge. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the fridge as if I expected it to blossom and grow in front of me. I stared at the fridge and it was like an EMPTY CANVAS, and in my mind the idea grew like a painting. The potential of the moment with all of its beautiful possibilities. The dream of what I could create.

You have probably heard that smallpox was destroyed, eliminated by a world-wide vaccination programme. But what I bet you didn’t know, is that after they wiped the disease out, the government kept a few samples of the virus just in case. Some are kept in the U.S and the rest are kept at some research institute in Moscow. Lots of people said that all samples of the virus should have been destroyed, but others pointed out that even if all the known samples were eliminated, other random sources could still exist and it would not be prudent to destroy them all. Vials like mine, for instance.

I stared at my fridge. I didn’t move for a whole day while I thought. I clutched my hands in my lap and wound my fingers into little knots. I sat there and dreamed the whole world into my canvas. It could be the greatest art project of all time. Living art is very popular. But what was I going to do with just one vial, such a tiny amount of my precious paint?

Even now I am sure there are other small vials out there. Vials like mine. But as I sat there, dreaming about my project, I realized how lucky I had been to find even one. I thought about how when they moved those last smallpox samples to those high security labs in Russia and America, no inspections were carried out to verify that other countries had actually destroyed their stocks of the virus like they said they would. I thought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and all those unemployed scientists who might have sold samples of smallpox to make biological weapons. Then I imagined a single corpse – just one would do – a person who had died of smallpox and is buried in the Arctic or beneath layers of Siberian permafrost.

But I had only one small vial in my fridge, and with it I dreamed my vision alive. I imagined the disease spreading out from me. I imagined myself as the DEEP CREATOR. I saw the pattern of it spreading away from me like a flower opening, but how to begin? How to make the first brush stroke on my empty canvas. Then my muse stood before me again. She opened the fridge and her hands were steady as she pressed the little vial into my hands. And then I knew what to do. I knew how to create more virus. And I realised that I had known all along what I needed to do. I still have syringes from before. I took one, filled it with the virus, and injected it into my arm.

For the first week nothing happened at all. I waited, dreamed and created while inside of my body, the virus replicated itself, entered my cells and grew stronger.

Then the fever came. My head and body ached and I threw up a few times. Then I lay still and as the fever soured, it was then that she started to come to me more solid than ever. Mary, my muse, standing at the bottom of the bed and watching me. My fever was high. I thought about taking something to bring the fever down, but I wanted her to stay. Later she brought her son with her. Held his hand. She sent him to sit with me and I would feel his ghostly hand touching my own, but Mary is confident in her medicine.

The RASH started on my tongue – small red spots. Then it spread. And it spread so fast! First to the roof of my mouth, then to my skin, from my face and arms and legs, then running down to my hands and feet. With the rash, my fever dropped, and I started to collect the things I would need: a few blood samples; I changed the bed sheets, but kept all the linen unwashed.

By the third day, my skin had risen up into bumps. The bumps filled with a liquid that was opaque like fluid in a blister. The bumps had a depression in the centre that looked like a bellybutton. My fever rose again, my eyes swelled closed, but all the time I could feel the child’s small hand on my arm while Mary kept watch over me.

‘If a person catches smallpox and lives, they develop immunity to the disease and can never catch it again,’ said Mary, sitting down on the edge of my bed and rubbing her thumb across my hand to sooth me. ‘Immunity is power.’ Mary told me how she had been only twenty-six when she had caught smallpox herself. That was in 1715. Up close I could see her pock-marked skin, but I could tell that before the disease she had been very beautiful. Now she has no eyelashes.

The bumps on my skin grew round and firm to my touch. It felt like having little pebbles embedded under my skin. I lay still on my back in a high fever. This was the most dangerous time, Mary said to me. One in three will die. This is a well-known proportion. Although some that live will go BLIND.

‘It was on a voyage to Turkey,’ said Mary, ‘that I first saw a child engrafted with smallpox. I watched an old woman make tiny cuts in the child’s skin with a needle, and then she inserted just a small amount of pus from a patient with a mild dose of the disease. When I got back to England, I waited until my husband was away, and then I convinced a doctor to inoculate my son in the same manner. He later developed what was no worse than a mild dose of chicken pox and the pustules healed without ever leaving a mark, but my son, as you see, is now immune to the disease.’

I listened while Mary spoke and her voice soothed me. ‘Everyone said smallpox was sent by God to punish sinners and to encourage others to stick to the path of righteousness,’ Mary whispered. She doesn’t look at me, but I can feel the shame of her pockmarked skin. ‘But I took my son to visit smallpox patients and within only twenty years the queen herself had her own children inoculated. But it was me. I was the first! Immunity is power.’ Mary is angry. Without smallpox she has lost her power.

At last the sores began to scab over and before long the scabs started to fall off. I kept them, each and every one alive with virus. I pressed them into towels and into papers and put them into plastic bags in my freezer. I took a long look at my pitted face, the strange scars of this disease. The shock of it almost made me faint for my skin was strange to me but my eyes within were bright with potential, and even as I looked at my new ugliness I felt a power stirring within me. A creative surge, the like of which I had never felt before.

I am back already in the department as if I were never away. Except that it’s not early in the morning any more. It’s the middle of the day, but I’m not afraid of them any more. It isn’t like a bomb. Nothing explodes. And I think I’ve already said that only a third will die. I leave the virus everywhere, on paper towels, the inside of gloves, teaspoons by the sink, the towel roll in the toilets, even some on the aerosol dispensers in the loos, so when they go off the virus will be blown around. I’m not exactly sure of the best way to do this, but the virus is quite stable. I had lots of time to read all about it. I have read that in the summer of 1763, for example, at the siege of Fort Pitt, the captain bought time by sending smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort. Early biological warfare. I kept all my sheets. The blood samples are for something special. And all it really needs is two or three, or even one person at first who will spread it on to others before they even know what grows inside of them. And my project will bloom.

‘Immunity is power,’ Mary whispers again. Even though the fever is long gone, I can still hear her voice inside my head. Now that smallpox is back I feel her growing stronger daily. She wants to talk about righteousness and God’s creation; but I am only interested in art, in MY creation. Living art.

In the basement level lab, the photograph of the guy with the dark eyes is gone from his desk. I am changing the bins in my apron, pushing my trolley with my mops and rags. Some people take a long time to move out of my way like they are too busy to see me, but I’m not afraid of them any more. The guy looks up from his desk and sees me; looks straight at me. The disease has given me STRENGTH and now I can look him in the eye. He looks away. Perhaps he is embarrassed that he is staring at my skin? Then it’s as if he thinks better of himself and looks at me again.

‘Here, let me get out of your way,’ he says, and pulls a few chairs out of the aisle to make room for me and my cleaner’s cart. Then I see him remember me from the time he spoke to me before. It’s like watching a light going on in those dark eyes. And he looks right at me again. ‘I’m Dan, by the way,’ he says, and holds out his hand.

I take his hand in mine. I hold it for longer than is strictly polite, but with him I want to be sure.

‘Call me Mary,’ I say.

Kay Woods has been writing and publishing short stories for a number of years. Her stories and poetry have appeared in magazines such as QWF and Mslexia.

Email: Kay Woods

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