Secret Pestilence

The man lying shivering on the ground at People’s Park hadn’t said a word for several hours. Some of the homeless men who had been sitting on wooden boxes nearby covered him with newspapers and a dirty blanket they had pulled from his shopping cart.

“How long has he been that way?” Charles asked.

The others shrugged their shoulders or turned away. Finally, one of them said, “He was sick yesterday too.”

Charles moved closer and kneeled down to get a better look at his face. “You all right?” he shouted.

The emaciated man was shaking so hard that his teeth were clacking and made no sign that he had heard. He had a shaggy dark-brown beard and tangled hair, and his withered face was caked with grime. Charles supposed that the man was having a seizure—or maybe just chills from spiking a fever—but whatever it was, the trembling wasn’t stopping.

“Someone ought to call an ambulance,” Charles said.

The men nodded, but they all remained silent. The only payphone was two blocks away inside a pharmacy, and the employees chased away homeless people who tried to enter. None of the men would have admitted to having money, and anyway, they had heard that the phone didn’t work most of the time.

“OK, I’ll go,” Charles said. He didn’t have any coins for the public phone either, but a secretary in the Anthropology Department on the campus would sometimes let him use her telephone for local calls. In spite of his unkempt appearance, Charles was rather handsome with his long hair that he wore in a ponytail and a slender build that many young women found attractive. He often stopped at People’s Park to talk with the homeless men and knew many of them by name.

The university had bought the property a few years before and had torn down the existing buildings to make way for student residence halls, but construction had never begun because of a lack of funding. Squatters had taken over the vacant lot resulting in a confrontation, first with the university president and the police, then with the governor, and finally with the National Guard. A protestor had died of a gunshot wound and another was partially blinded from tear gas, leading to more outrage toward civil authority by some Berkeley residents, already aroused with anger about the Vietnam War. People’s Park had provided an opportunity to defy the establishment, and the squatters were still there a whole decade later.

Charles had been only a high school student at the time of the original conflict, but he felt a sense of kinship with the people and the park that he associated with the protest. He had hated the war, and his father had helped him obtain a draft deferral to attend the University of California at Berkeley after his high school graduation. His older sister Lynn had actually volunteered to join the navy, an act that Charles could never understand or forgive. Worse, she still participated in the navy reserves when she didn’t have to.

He left the park and ran the three blocks on Telegraph Avenue towards the campus past little shops and entered through Sather Gate, hardly noticing the young woman speaking into a bullhorn from the steps of one of the buildings nearby. Demonstrations were daily lunchtime events. The secretary wasn’t in the department office, but he knew how to obtain an outside line, and so he helped himself to the phone and dialed 911 for an ambulance. The voice on the other end asked for the name and address of the patient.

“He’s in People’s Park. I don’t know his name,” Charles said.

After a short silence the voice asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m a student.”

“Do you have a name?”

Charles gave his name to the voice.

“Why are you calling for an ambulance?”

“The man is lying on the ground having seizures. They won’t stop.”

After another short pause the voice said, “All right. We’ll send an ambulance.”

Charles hung up and walked back outside, stopping to listen for a few minutes to the young woman speaking on the bullhorn. She was talking about animal rights and the cruel experimentation that universities and pharmaceutical companies routinely performed to test new drugs. He wanted to hear more, but he also needed to be sure that the ambulance came, so he turned around and walked back toward the park.

When he arrived, he found that the men sitting on the boxes hadn’t moved and were still staring at the shaking victim. Charles noticed that the sick man’s head was bumping against the bare ground. He stooped over to lift it in order to wad newspapers underneath and noticed that the man’s skin was hot—and he didn’t respond to having his head moved.

The ambulance still hadn’t come, so Charles joined the other men waiting silently. When he looked closer, he realized that the sick man’s age probably wasn’t more than thirty, just a few years older than Charles himself. He had originally thought that the man was older because of his wasted body.

After several more minutes, an ambulance eased into a parking space nearby, and two attendants got out. They opened the rear door to retrieve a gurney and rolled it toward the group surrounding the victim on the ground. Some of the homeless men moved aside to make room for the attendants to lift the man onto the gurney.

“What’s his name?” One of them asked.

No one answered at first, but then two of the homeless men responded at the same time. “Lance,” they said.

“Is that his last name?”

The two men looked at each other, and then one said, “Lance isn’t his real name. He told us he was a lance corporal in the marines in Vietnam—so we call him Lance.”

An attendant checked the patient’s pockets but found no identification.

“Where are you taking him?” Charles asked.

The attendants seemed surprised by the question. “The county hospital,” one of them answered.

“Alta Bates Hospital is a lot closer,” Charles said.

The attendants looked at each other, shook their heads, and loaded the gurney and patient into the ambulance. One started an IV, while the other set up an oxygen mask.

“May I go with him?” Charles asked.

“You a relative?”

Charles shook his head. “No.”

“You can catch up with him later at the hospital,” one of the attendants said. The other climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine, and turned on the flashing red light on the top of the ambulance. The men in the park continued to watch as the ambulance moved off slowly with the traffic without using the siren. Charles stood there staring for several minutes after it disappeared and then began walking back toward the university. He would be late for his seminar because of his detour at the park, and the professor always made sarcastic remarks about students who arrived late.

When he reached Bancroft Avenue on the edge of the campus, he turned left away from the building where the seminar was being held and walked downhill. He slipped his hand into his pocket to be sure that he had the BART card that his mother bought for him every week for his commute from San Francisco. The station was nearby on Shattuck Avenue, only a short distance from the campus. He could take BART to the Lake Merritt station and then go on foot the rest of the way to Highland Hospital, the charity medical center for Alameda County. The climb up the hill would be long, but he had grown up walking all over San Francisco and didn’t mind. The weather was perfect as usual, and Charles enjoyed being out in the warm sun.

Since it was early, the emergency room hadn’t yet filled, and he had to wait only a few minutes to speak to the medical assistant at the triage desk. He noted the bored people sitting in the waiting room trying to ignore the loud television set...