Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science Read Free

sounds, as well as the emotional aura of the scene. These kinds of observed details might be called deep notes. Deep notes are a record of the visceral reality in which the characters exist—notes on the soup. Deep notes can be details of how people move their bodies, what they wear, what sorts of tics and gestures they display. I always try to note the color of a person’s eyes, and, when possible, I try to observe their hands.
    One of the main figures in The Hot Zone is Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, an Army space-suit scientist who specializes in Ebola virus. I met Nancy Jaax during my first visit to Fort Detrick, on a warm spring day. She turned out to be a pleasant, energetic, articulate officer who seemed incredibly committed to her work. I learned that she was a mother of two children, who were then in high school. Her eyes were blue-green and active, with flecks of gold encircling the irises. About fifteen minutes into my first interview with her, I asked her if she had ever had a scary experience with Ebola virus. “Oh, sure,” she answered. “That’s where you realize that habits can save your life.”
    “What sort of habits?” I asked.
    She explained that when you’re working with a hot virus like Ebola, it’s essential to constantly check your space suit. A suit can get a hole in it. The person inside the suit might not notice the creation of the breach. Nancy Jaax had been trained to frequently check her space suit for leaks. One day, she was cutting open a dead Ebola-infected monkey, and her space suit was splashed with Ebola-infected monkey blood up to the forearms. Then, during a routine safety check, she discovered a hole in the arm of the suit, near the glove. Ebola-infected blood had run down into the hole and was oozing around inside her space suit and had soaked her arm and wrist. “I had an open cut on my hand, with a Band-Aid on it,” she said. She’d gotten the cut opening a can of beans for her children. The incident “fell into the category of a close call,” she said. In the end, she survived her encounter with Ebola only because her habit of checking her space suit for leaks enabled her to get out of the hot zone fast and remove her bloody space suit. Her narrative left me mesmerized.
    There’s a useful technique for capturing important moments during an interview that I call the delayed note. When someone is saying something powerful, you don’t always want to draw attention to the fact that you’re writing down their words, because they may pull back and stop talking. So, on rare occasions, I may stop writing. I put down my notebook. I try to get a neutral expression on my face, as if I’m not that interested. Meanwhile, I’m trying to memorize exactly what the person is saying. When I sense that my short-term memory is getting full, I change the subject and ask a question that I expect will result in a dull answer. The person begins giving the dull answer, and I begin jotting delayed notes in my notebook. I’m writing down what the person said moments earlier, while I was not taking notes. (I learned this technique from John McPhee, who teaches an undergraduate writing course at Princeton University called The Literature of Fact. I had taken his course as a graduate student.) So, as Nancy Jaax began to talk about the blood in her space suit, I put down my notes and listened.
    This was just the beginning of the research for a key scene in The Hot Zone, narrating how Nancy Jaax got a hole in her space suit and Ebola blood flowed inside it. At one point, much later, I spent twenty minutes sitting with Jaax at her kitchen table, taking notes on her hands. I examined her hands minutely, left and right, back and front, staring at them like a palm reader. Hands are a window into character. Jaax kindly submitted to my study of her hands, though I think it weirded her out just a little.
    “Where did you get that scar on your knuckle?” I asked.
    “Which one? That one? That’s