Havana Syndrome

Gideon’s second-floor sunroom faced south and had big-sky views of downtown Greenfield, Massachusetts. To the east, past a neighborhood of attractive and well-built houses from the region’s golden age, she could see the tree tops of the upper Pocumtuck Range. If she leaned forward in her wicker chaise, she could see to the west the first of the Berkshire foothills. Gideon and her husband planned to drive down the valley to the prosperous college town of Amherst for grocery shopping and takeout, but for now they lounged with the breakfast dishes in front of them. Chimney swifts, returned from their winter migration, swooped over the town.

Gideon’s husband wore tidy clothing, but Gideon still wore her sleeping costume underneath a pilled hoodie and ankle-length sweatpants. There was some unfamiliar skin-on-skin action happening underneath her breasts, like a new neighbor from a markedly different ethnic group whom one must learn to get along with. The stickiness reminded Gideon that she wasn’t young anymore, and unhappy memories rushed forward.

“I will never be free of these events,” she thought. “They made me who I am.”

Out loud she continued the conversation of a few minutes before, “It isn’t that I know for sure Havana Syndrome is caused by the spray cleaner, or the fungicide, or the carpets. It is that no one is talking about this possibility.”

She paused to gather her thoughts.

“The first reason: people are stuck on the belief that the effects of manmade chemicals are necessarily in proportion to exposure. The second reason: people have blind faith that the products around them are safe.”

Her husband sipped his coffee. She knew that if he spoke, it would be to say that he had heard all this before, so she let the topic drop and returned to her own silent monologue.

“Is there any upside to extreme illness?” she wondered. “I’m not more empathetic with those who have suffered in ways that are different from me. I no longer believe the world is kind. At least I see my life clearly. At least I’ve stopped wanting to do the things I used to do.”

To cheer herself up, Gideon lifted her breasts with her fingertips, one soft sack in each hand. She slid the fabric of her hoodie and shirt under each breast and then lowered them back onto her chest. She looked down at the little half-full fabric bags. They were adorable.

“Hoist and tuck,” she laughed out loud. “Very good.”

“What if someone sees you do that?” her husband said.

“They belong to me,” Gideon said. “I can do whatever I want with them.”

“Who were you talking to on the phone earlier?”

“In a minute. First let me tell you about some changes around here.”

“I’m ready.”

“I want to change my name,” Gideon said. “I want you to call me Little Cutie. Whenever you say it, I will feel a surge of happiness. Each time you hear yourself say it, you will be reinforced in your perception of my petite charm.”

Her husband snorted.

Gideon continued, “I will call you Big Sweetie, hoping that the power of suggestion will encourage you to become a less stubborn and truculent companion.”

“I’m not going to call you Little Cutie.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Well, I’m not going to call you Little Cutie in front of anyone else. They might throw up.”

“You only have to call me Little Cutie when we are at home or driving in the car.”

“I will do anything that gets me more nookie,” Big Sweetie said.

“Say my name,” Gideon said.

“Little Cutie.”

“Say it again.”

“Little Cutie,” he sputtered.

The birds’ twittering swooped here and there and Gideon considered getting ready to go.

“Who was on the phone?” Big Sweetie said.

“Diane. I only got through a few emails this morning before she called. Something happened that she wanted to tell me about.”

Gideon paused to find the right words of disclaimer. She and Diane hadn’t talked in several years, during which Gideon had been haunted by something Diane had told her. Diane, a freediver and spear fisher, habitually “traded up,” meaning if she reached her quota but knew there were bigger fish nearby, she dumped the small fish back into the sea. Gideon felt wounded by the pointlessness and waste of these deaths.

“You and I are ambivalent about the whole spear fishing thing,” she said to Big Sweetie.

“All that craziness.”

“I’ve been wondering when reality would catch up with her. So much killing. It always seemed there would be a price to pay. But I want to tell her story properly and we don’t have time.”

Gideon put a pair of bib overalls over her at-home clothing, combed her hair, and gathered the reusable shopping bags. Big Sweetie backed the car out of the garage and waited for her.

#

From his upper-floor office in the Malcolm Danson Life Sciences Center, Alan alternately gazed onto an expansive view and scanned his email backlog. His research institute occupied the top floors of the building. His own corner office suite overlooked both the main campus and Amherst town center to the south, and to the north, playing fields, parking lots, and meadows. The neo-brutalist building had been funded, constructed, and outfitted by his friend Malcolm’s various companies, and on this spring mid-morning his thoughts returned to his last conversation with Malcolm. Late the previous summer the two men had met for lunch at their usual hangout, Gourmet Shanghai in downtown Amherst. Malcolm was uncharacteristically effusive, almost slaphappy, although neither was drinking and Alan hadn’t smelled alcohol on Malcolm’s breath.

“The real advantage to the stock market isn’t access to capital, although that is very nice,” Malcolm intoned, leaning back in the booth and looking like a tapioca pudding-colored Jabba the Hutt. “It is that all those voters believe you are acting to their advantage, so they protect you from regulation.”

Usually the two men enjoyed the simple pleasures of recalling the university’s sports triumphs. Alan adjusted to the unfamiliar topic.

“That is why, when the environment is all stitched up for certain industries, they go private,” Malcolm laughed too loudly for the restaurant. “No need for the fucks anymore.”

The purple blotches and wounded veins on the backs of Malcolm’s hands distracted Alan from deciding whether by “the environment” Malcolm meant birds and oceans, or the regulatory and legal structure for his businesses.

After lunch, Malcolm’s driver dropped Alan back at his office. Alan’s assistant was somber.

“Malcolm’s person called,” Joan said. “Malcolm wants you to know he has pancreatic cancer.”

Alan imagined Malcolm’s world of benzene mists hovering over factory floors, carpet-fiber extruders in airplane hangar-sized rooms, small women with nimble fingers seated in rows before piles of electronic components. Malcolm’s tone-deaf non sequiturs had come from his illness, Alan realized. He described Malcolm’s behavior to Joan.

“What do you think?” Alan said. “It was so unlike him.”

“He actually said ‘no need for the fucks anymore’?” Joan wore an expression of child-like wonder, but as if from a nasty shock.

“I can’t say I know what he was talking about,” Alan struggled to understand her surprise.

“Wow,” Joan looked away from Alan, covered her face with her hands, and began rubbing her forehead with her fingertips.

“When he dies,” she looked disgusted when she finally took her hands away from her face. “When he dies all the news articles will say what a philanthropist he was.”

Alan, now frowning himself, went into his own office and wrote Malcolm a note of condolence. This email and those that followed were unanswered, so over the next months Alan waited for news from other sources.

The Danson building, though graceless, did have large windows that were cleaned regularly. Early in spring, teams hung from the top of the building to wash the outside glass surfaces, making their way up and down with noisy ratcheting. Other men disrupted the potted plants and objet d’art on the window sills and filled the rooms with the fragrance of blue or pink glass-cleaner. At around the same time a cherry picker proceeded up the sycamore allée leading to the building from the south, plucking wind-blown plastic bags from the branches before the leaves filled in. Between dips into his inbox, Alan watched the young man on the cherry picker moving among the knobbly branches, enjoying the university’s embrace, its power to insulate him from dirt, inconvenience, physical labor.

Alan opened an email headed, “Your 2019 Havana Syndrome paper” from an unfamiliar sender. Alan’s institute had initiated this complex study and Malcolm had suggested specific contributors from government and industry as well as academia. The study, amid many disclaimers, concluded that targeted microwaves were the most likely cause of the symptoms experienced by the hundreds of embassy staff. Alan was taken aback by the directness of the first line of the email, “Your paper rejected a chemical trigger on the basis that any chemical exposures were either negligible or impossible to quantify, but there is no natural law that the effects on human neurology from manmade toxins must be proportionate.”

“Of course the effects of toxins are proportionate,” thought Alan. “This is a central tenet of neurological scientific papers.”

He read on about multinational corporations using the same building components, furnishings, and cleaning supplies across disparate locations, and how even small exposures could have a wide range of life-altering symptoms in some people.

“Hogwash,” said Alan out loud.

The sender, gideonlatch@gmail.com, wrote that he himself had environmental illness and had, in response to innocuous-seeming exposures to everyday chemicals, experienced all of the symptoms that the Havana Syndrome sufferers had.

“Wasn’t it possible,” Mr. Latch concluded, “that Havana Syndrome and environmental illness, sometimes called multiple chemical sensitivities, have the same cause, namely day-to-day manmade chemicals whose effects on human health have never been tested or quantified?”

“Absolutely not,” said Alan, out loud again. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”

Alan cranked back in his chair and watched the manlift thread its way through the bare branches below him. He leaned forward and read the email again. It unsettled him. What would Malcolm have suggested? He, fifteen years older than Alan, had always offered sensible career and personal advice. Many years before, after meeting newly-hired Joan and with Alan’s office door closed behind them, Malcolm turned to Alan and said, “Very pretty, my boy. And she likes you. But don’t shit where you swim.”

Alan and Joan both weathered the little crush Joan seemed to have on him during their early years together. She aligned her interests with Alan’s just as he aligned his with Malcolm’s. It was Joan who turned his office into a pleasant haven, lining the window sill with plants and replacing the grey carpeting, which she called “Malcolm’s stinky rug product,” with blonde bamboo eco-laminate. As Alan’s committee assignments, government consulting gigs, and university interdepartmental appointments piled up, he wrangled job grade increases for her as often as he could. Like the university’s infrastructure, Joan’s cheerful and loyal presence became a pillar of his own contentment and ease.

Joan possessed the gift of anticipating and preventing administrative problems before they developed. Beyond her, an army of graduate students and post-graduates taught Alan’s classes and performed the heavy lifting of technical language recall for his research and writing projects. Between Joan and his large staff, Alan in his late career had plenty of time to sit and think.

Alan started up the TOR browser, which he used for researching people requesting a reference, a job, or a favor. Gideon Latch, a woman, had a small footprint. She lived in a nearby hardscrabble town known for its liberal politics and activism. The town’s name evoked felled cathedrals of elms, neighborhoods of large Victorians with deferred maintenance, hundred year-old factory buildings slowly finding new lives as health clinics, small businesses, or offices for regional government functions.

Alan found a photograph of Gideon in a local newspaper article about native pollinators. It showed smiling middle-aged women standing in a field of wildflowers similar to the ones beyond the university’s large parking lots. He contemplated the photograph for a while. His mind clicked methodically to reconcile the portentous email with the image of gentle and earnest people enjoying a beautiful New England day.

It was almost lunchtime when Joan put through a call from Alan’s long-time associate Jeremy, who ran an institute similar to Alan’s at Harvard Medical School.

“Did you get an email recently about the 2019 report we did, on Havana Syndrome?” said Jeremy.

“No,” Alan wanted Gideon’s ideas to never have existed.

Jeremy described the email.

“Best to ignore it,” Alan said. “Sounds like a crank.”

“That was my first impulse,” said Jeremy. “But this person clearly didn’t read the report. I wrote back and told them to read the report.”

Alan had a start. It was clear that Gideon had read their study carefully. Attacking someone personally showed weakness.

“Why did you write back? You will just encourage her.”

“I think it was a man, not a woman. The name was Gideon something. Why do you think it was a woman?”

“Isn’t it usually women who write that sort of email?”

Alan thought back to the handful of letters he had gotten from military veterans twenty-five years earlier. Malcolm had encouraged him to publish a paper debunking the neurological effects of Gulf War chemical exposures and stressing PTSD and psychosomatic influences instead. The letters had all come from men in despair because they couldn’t leave their homes, and sometimes even their bedrooms, without becoming ill with a range of neurological effects from fragrances and other everyday chemicals, or so they claimed. Alan had quickly become impatient with the terrible handwriting, grammatical errors, and, in the printed letters, the typos. He intuited, without curiosity, that the poor writing was caused by a combination of illness and inadequate education. He felt alienated by the news profiles about the men’s suffering and their bleak life circumstances.

“They joined a war, so what did they expect?” Malcolm said, agreeing with him. “How are we supposed to take their complaints seriously if they can’t speak or write properly?”

Alan turned his attention back to Jeremy.

“But that email isn’t the reason for my call,” Jeremy was saying.

Alan listened more closely. Jeremy was a source of reliable gossip.

“Your friend Danson died this morning,” Jeremy said. “It will be all over the news in a few hours. They’ll be looking for soundbites.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” Alan realized he should have prepared a response for this eventuality.

“Word is that your institute will receive a packet.” Jeremy emphasized this last word with a percussive sound that suggested congratulations.

“Thanks for that,” Alan said, and meant it.

Joan was on the telephone when Alan passed her desk, so Alan wrote on a yellow sticky that he would bring her some Chinese for lunch. As he left the building, he remembered years of worrying about funding, currying favor, watching Malcolm eat. He felt expansive and light as he walked between the rows of sycamores toward the town center.

The restaurant manager remembered him and seated him in the window booth where he and Malcolm had gotten together eight months earlier. Alan was happy that he would never have to sit there with Malcolm again. He watched people come and go outside and composed a blurb in his head for any reporters who called him later that day.

Alan ordered his own meal and asked the waitress to make his dish spicy. When his food arrived he ordered the takeout for Joan. “Life is good,” he wanted to say to the waitress or to his fellow diners. “There is room for all of us to be rewarded and successful.” He ate heartily and took the check to the back of the restaurant to pick up the food for Joan and thank the manager in person.

A woman stood at the register preparing to accept a paper bag of takeout from the manager. Her clothing was what Joan affectionately called “Pioneer Valley-casual,” evoking farm stands, organic gardens, river cleanup days. She wore, not a lightweight mask made of cloth, but a half-face respirator with two filter cartridges, as though against a gas attack. She felt Alan staring and glanced at him, then turned back to hand the manager her payment. When she and the manager had concluded the transaction and she had put a few bills in the tip jar, she looked at Alan again. He had become disconcerted.

Why did she have to wear the grotesque thing in public? he thought. Didn’t she know she would frighten people? Mask mandates came and went, but there was no need for this statement of danger and ominous threat in such a small town and among these lovely people.

He continued to stare at her, finally feeling slightly aggressive. She seemed only slowly to realize the reason for his gaze.

“That’s quite a mask you’ve got there,” he said, expressing what he considered the correct balance of censure and fake bonhomie.

The woman stepped toward him and pulled the mask down and away from her face so he could hear her words. “I have chemical sensitivities,” she said in a level and low voice. “I wear this when I go anywhere in public.” Her forehead was tensed as if she had received a blow. The mask had made red crescents over her nose and cheekbones and these red blotches accentuated the shadows under her eyes. Her slight frown reminded him of the worried looks on the faces of the veterans claiming illness from the Gulf War.

The woman’s face was familiar, like an actor with whom Alan had a strong emotional memory but who was now inhabiting a completely different persona and therefore impossible to place. He became frustrated by his failed efforts to remember where he had seen her before and he also felt foolish. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that she had a legitimate reason for wearing the large ugly mask? Better yet, why hadn’t he ignored her? All of the events of the day must have wrong-footed him. Normally he would never have approached a stranger in this way.

“Yes!” Alan exclaimed, as if asserting to her and anyone nearby that of course what she said was true, that in fact the two of them were good friends, and that he agreed with her totally. His voice came out louder than he intended. The woman left the register with her paper bag.

The manager stared at Alan and there was wiggling and adjustment among the diners at the back of the room as they tried to figure out what had happened. Act normal, Alan said to himself. Whatever you do, don’t overtip.

By the time Alan reached the bottom of the sycamore allée, the day had turned gray. He felt unmoored as he replayed his lies to Jeremy and the confrontation that he had initiated in the restaurant. He sensed that the woman’s identity was important, yet her altered guise and his own distracted and fragmented thoughts rendered her un-nameable. For reasons hidden in his subconscious, she evoked an association with his job and with Malcolm. As he continued searching through memory for her identity, a channel opened to reveal, in words, what he had kept hidden and inchoate since first learning of Malcolm’s illness.

“His cancer proved that the world he nurtured was destructive and false,” Alan thought. “The truth finally came for him.”

Alan allowed more words to surface, words that he had repeatedly suppressed during the Malcolm years, “He was a man of hate.”

He trudged up the walkway carrying the small bag with Joan’s lunch. His own lunch began to roil inside his stomach. The trees passed in a dark rhythm and his consciousness became a mantra that he beat out with his steps. Left, right, left, right, “man of hate, man of hate . . . “

Alan reached the front of his building and stopped, unsteady. His salivary glands were active, suggesting his lunch might be coming back up soon, yet his mouth was dry because he had walked up the hill with his jaw slack. The muscles around his eyes were tight and he sensed that the inward concentration of his mantra’d stomping had given him a worried appearance. He glanced around to make sure no one was looking at him, unable to assemble his features into their normal configuration. There was no way he would be able to face news reporters, much less Joan, who would surely read on his face what she had known since the day they both learned about Malcolm’s cancer. Had he only ever been Malcolm’s foot soldier?

Alan felt an adrenalin jolt when he imagined handing Joan her lunch. The hideous and oppressive structure loomed above him. He wanted to throw up in private, take a shower, then have a nap in a warm place. He took a few steps forward and, with a pang, shoved Joan’s lunch through the swinging lid of a garbage bin near the building entrance. He veered away from the entrance toward his own parking space north of the building, walking carefully so that he didn’t either stumble or vomit before reaching his car.

#

Gideon and Big Sweetie took their takeout up to the sunroom, which was pleasantly warm and smelled like spring.

“Diane says she doesn’t fish or hunt anymore,” Gideon began. “It had to do with what she calls the bogey-fish. The great whites. Only one, but it was a big guy.”

“Was she out by herself?” Big Sweetie breathed in deeply, as if to prepare himself for an ordeal.

“Of course.”

“Go ahead.”

“So she’s off Rhode Island somewhere, lying on the bottom in murky water near a clump of rocks and holding her breath. I want to say just minding her own business, but of course it isn’t her business. Nowhere in the natural order of things is she supposed to be there. This is what I take issue with. She says she respects and loves nature, but it’s as though someone told her when she was a small child that she had to be big in the world, and the only way she could figure out to accomplish this was by killing lots of animals.”

“Enough editorializing. Get on with it.”

“She hears a thump, and you know how she can tell from a thump the kind of fish, long before she sees it? Well, there is a thump, and right away she says to herself to act as little like a seal as possible. Because that is what they eat, as you know.”

“I haven’t had to remember that recently, but yes, I guess I did know that.”

“The thumps come closer. Now I’m thinking how could it really be a thump? It must be sound waves from flexing a huge muscle, like when Popeye eats a can of spinach. I doubt you or I could have heard it or would know to pay attention. But she can hear them, so she is ready.”

“Doesn’t she have an inflatable boat? Where is her boat?”

“Too far away. She doesn’t want to be hanging over the edge trying to haul herself in while wiggling. Too much like a seal. She decides to stay put.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this story.”

“Bear with me here. You’ll appreciate the payoff, the denouement, as they say. The beast heaves into view out of the murk, probably like they do in the movies, with its mouth open. The angle isn’t right for her to stop its brain with her spear, so she shoots at its side as it goes by the rocks. She’s trying to get it to go away, but the spear glances off and falls into the murk. The shark comes back around as she is hiding behind the rocks and she punches it a few times on its flank. She has a knife strapped to her calf, but she doesn’t want to knife it because she doesn’t want it to take the knife away in its flesh. Or maybe she is saving the knife for later, when it bites her. Then she’ll be close enough to stab it in the head.”

“Jeepers,” said Big Sweetie.

“Yeah. I guess sharks are used to sharp impacts, because it doesn’t seem discouraged by the punching. In the meantime she is starting to worry. You know that freediving thing. The whole time you are down, you are managing the oxygen levels in your blood. I imagine it’s second nature for her after all these years, but by now she’s running out of air.”

“I don’t think that’s the technical term.”

“You know what I mean,” Gideon filled her own lungs deeply. “You know how when you have to hold your breath for a long time, like to avoid fumes from a bus or from dryer sheets, and your insides feel like they are going to give way? This starts to happen to her and it gives her an idea. She told me that she didn’t have much oxygen left, but she had other resources. That’s what she said. She reaches around behind herself, pulls the wetsuit away from her butt, and cuts a slit down the back. She knows she has to be super-careful not to nick herself, and she doesn’t. Then she does the same with her swimsuit. So her bare backside is hanging out in that cold, cold water.”

“What for?”

Gideon paused for effect and stared at him meaningfully.

“Oh, no,” said Big Sweetie, starting to laugh.

“It was huge,” Gideon started to laugh too. “All of the contents from high up in her intestine. Everything what she got. All of it. It all comes out. She, who is always cutting open big animals, so she is well familiar with what is inside, even she is surprised by how much of it there was and how fast it came out of her.”

Big Sweetie was howling with laughter.

“Bear with. Bear with. I’m almost done. The water was murky already, but now even more so. The big guy swings around for another pass at her, all open mouth and teeth, and when it comes to the cloud, it shakes itself and swims away.”

“Saved by her own poo,” he said, tears running down his face.

“What I don’t understand,” said Big Sweetie after they calmed down, “is why she didn’t kill it. She had a spear and a knife.”

“It seems like she could have found a way to kill it, or at least to maim it so badly that it went away sooner. She has killed small sharks before. Maybe she knew it was a sign and she wanted to be sure she understood the message.” Gideon took a balled-up hankie from the bottom of her sleeve and wiped her eyes and blew her nose before continuing.

“So anyway, she hauled herself into the dinghy and took off the rest of her wetsuit and swimming suit, because she was cold and the sun was warm. She lay there naked in the boat for hours, like baby Moses among the rushes. She was waiting for her new life to begin, I guess, because when she got home she gave away or sold all of her fishing and hunting gear, all of it. Even stuff she’d had for fifty years.”

“Wow,” said Big Sweetie, shaking his head.

“That is why she finally called me. She has time on her hands.” Gideon thought of the decades of accretion, all of the memories of death and killing, all of the excitement and anticipation of full ownership of other living things as Diane claimed them for herself. Some new reality had come for her and her greedy harvesting of innocents had finally ended.

Gideon had sat up straight to tell Diane’s story. Now she slouched again.

“One of the Havana Syndrome researchers wrote me back,” she said. “He said that I obviously hadn’t read their paper and he suggested that I do so.”

“Who was this guy?” said Big Sweetie. “You are fooling yourself that those people are going to engage in honest dialogue with you.”

“Some clapped-out muckamuck, like all of them,” said Gideon. “His response didn’t make sense, which means I’ve got them on the run. Maybe I’ll fictionalize it. I can change the details so I’m not sued.”

She laughed a little. Her breasts were sticking to the skin over her ribcage again.

“There are a million online magazines,” Gideon continued. She looked down at her breasts, so fragrant and wonderful, so real. She did another hoist and tuck. “How hard can it be to get a story published?”

“Stop playing with your tits,” said Big Sweetie. “You’re making my little stick twitch.”

“Ha ha,” said Gideon.