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

where a goat bit me when I was nine,” she answered, touching the scar. It had been a goat on her family’s farm in Kansas, she explained, and she could still recall how much the bite had hurt.
    Deep notes can also be notes on what a person is thinking. Of course, since you can’t read minds, you have to ask people what they are thinking or were thinking. After I’ve written a passage describing a person’s stream of thoughts—a type of narrative that fiction writers refer to as interior monologue—I always fact-check it with the person later. I read the passage aloud, usually on the telephone. I ask the person, “Do these sentences accurately reflect your recollection of what was going through your mind at that moment?”
    Often, the person answers, “Not exactly,” and proceeds to correct what I’ve written to make it more faithful to their own memory. If it was an especially dramatic, emotional, or terrifying moment, the person can often give a consistent account of what they were thinking and feeling. (Witnesses to crimes often don’t accurately remember the facts of what they saw—but they do remember their feelings with clarity.)
    After Jaax had realized that Ebola blood was slopping around inside her space suit, she had to make an emergency exit from Level 4. She went into the air lock and stood in the chemical shower, feeling the blood squishing around on her arm and hand.
    “Were you thinking you would die?” I asked her.
    “No,” she replied. Instead, she had been thinking about the fact that she had forgotten to go to the bank to get money for the babysitter who was taking care of her kids that day. If she was infected with Ebola, the authorities would lock her in the Slammer, and who was going to pay the babysitter?
    I don’t think a novelist would be likely to invent this. And if it appeared in a novel, it might not ring true. Yet Jaax’s account of what she was thinking is completely believable because it occurs in a nonfiction narrative. It seems to reverberate with general human truth. It is a statement about mothers, children, and death, and it cut me to the heart when I heard it. I could not have made it up.
    In the bloody space-suit scene, when Nancy Jaax emerged from the chemical shower and took off her suit to examine her hand, to see if there was any Ebola blood on it, I described her hands in detail as her gloves came off. Just a couple of sentences. These sentences were the result of the long examination of her hands at her kitchen table. I mentioned the scar on her knuckle and that she’d gotten it as a girl from a goat bite at her family’s farm in Kansas. The scar was a microstory. It told the reader that Nancy Jaax was a Kansas farm girl; she was Dorothy in Level 4.
    While I often take photographs to supplement my notes, I almost never use a tape recorder. Apart from the fact that a tape recorder always seems to fail when it’s most needed, the device makes the person who’s being recorded self-conscious. An interviewee will stare at the tape recorder while his or her speech becomes awkward, not like the natural, lively voice of a person in real life. Indeed, cameras and sound recorders aren’t sufficient for deep notes. No electronic recording device can capture the interplay of the human senses. For capturing sensual reality, it seems that only an old-fashioned reporter’s notebook has sufficiently advanced technology. I take notes in longhand in little spiral notebooks. They are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. I use a mechanical pencil.

     

    T WO A RMY VIRUS RESEARCHERS walked down one of the long corridors of USAMRIID , at Fort Detrick. I had been hanging around with them that day. My shirt pocket had a magnetic security card clipped to it, with the word VISITOR on it. My shirt pocket also contained a small reporter’s notebook and a mechanical pencil. The walls of the corridor were cinder block, painted the color of sputum. Thick glass windows looked into