"The Hot Zone" got out of my backpack while I was off fishing. There were other choices in our motley array of tents--Cormac McCarthy novels, Paul Bowles stories, "The Magic Mountain" and Ralph Cutter's "Sierra Trout Guide." But it was my nondescript advance proof of "The Hot Zone" that inflamed Jim's interest, and for the rest of our five-day trip the book and its story spread.
Under a full moon, with kids whittling around a comforting fire, Jim recalled a scene in which researchers slice through single cells with a diamond blade so sharp you would never feel its prick. The book jumped to Paul. Paul read feverishly, then described the hideous event known as "bleeding out." "The Hot Zone" passed to a Bay Area friend.
I didn't regain possession and start reading until we returned to civilization. Only then, after involuntarily blurting "Oh no!" mid-sentence, did I fully comprehend the book's infectiousness.
What we had on that remote lake shore in the Sierra Nevada, I now realize, was a "microbreak." The story had erupted and, for the moment, been geographically contained. Trust me on this, though--"The Hot Zone" is going to sweep the population like fresh gossip in an office with E-mail.
And the whole story is true.
The passage that caused my uncharacteristic outburst comes a few chapters into Richard Preston's tour de force. Major Nancy Jaax, a veterinarian in the U.S. Army's little-known Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has just taped herself into a sealed Chemturion biological "space suit" and stepped through an airlock into a dangerous and obsessively controlled Level 4 biocontainment area known as "the hot zone."
Soon Jaax is ripping apart a diseased monkey's skull. Wrist-deep in blood and tissue, she thinks: "No blood. I don't like blood. Every time I see a drop of blood, I see a billion viruses."
Jaax, is investigating a "filovirus" called Ebola, a "Level 4 hot agent" which, by definition, is lethal and contagious, and has no vaccine or cure. It is, we are told, "a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles."
In 1967, a filovirus traveled to Germany in the blood of an African Green monkey. There it "jumped species" to a man who handled research primates, and started spreading so quickly, Preston says, that for a few days "doctors in the city thought the world was coming to an end."
In 1976, a hot agent known as Ebola Zaire emerged like a phantom tiger from the jungle. It rampaged through 55 villages, slaughtering nine out of ten people it infected, before mysteriously petering out. Most such "microbreaks" have remained confined to Africa. But there is no doubting the virus' ambition.
In one scene, Preston describes a virus undergoing "extreme amplification" at a Nairobi hospital. As the afflicted patient dies, blood and bile spout from every orifice, letting the virus find new "hosts" in doctors and nurses.
Earlier, the passengers of a crowded plane watched the same patient fill his airsickness bag to the brim with black vomit, a substance that smells like a slaughterhouse and swarms with the wildly contagious disease. In case anyone misses the point, Preston reminds us: "A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth."
Now that HIV--a mere Level 2 agent--has cut its tragic swath, it's hard to dismiss such observations as alarmist melodrama. And remember: "Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish."
Given such startling facts, "Hot Zone" left me craving more biology. But it's clear why Preston pruned as he did. He uses the power of simple narrative to drive deep this story's urgent truths. Well-placed lyrical asides lodge Preston's biological mystery in parts of the mind that straight science often leaves untouched: troops of monkeys leap through the crowns of camphor trees at night; villagers sob outside huts in which their loved ones writhe and die; mummified baby elephants litter a crevasse in a cave where the virus may hibernate in insect or mammal hosts.
In the book's credits, Preston recalls feeding his editor the cliche: "God is in the details."
"No," she replied. "God is in the structure."
Preston, as it happens, is a master of both. In a scene that illuminates Nancy Jaax's harried domestic life, the wife and mother slices the palm of her hand while hastily opening a can of beans with a butcher knife. Preston reveals this detail--along with the disturbing particulars of Ebola's aggression--just before Jaax performs the monkey autopsy. How could I not blurt "Oh no!" when Jaax spotted the hole in her blood-sopped "space suit"?
