Contagion

By Lynn Bentley

The novel, Contagion, can work as an allegory to life in the US under questionable leadership. It is set in America, in the midst of a devastating pandemic. Through this, Lynn Bentley works an allegory of life under the erosion of democratic values, without any political leanings getting in the way of the interpretation and acknowledges that many of the ideas for the book came from Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. One of his most famous quotes, illuminated in this book is: The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

When the pandemic hits shortly after social norms begin to break down, it causes, the denial of politicians, life to come to a standstill and a city to be closed off to the outside world. The population is no longer able to enjoy normal past times or materialistic endeavors. A culture of mistrust comes into play where people fear that their neighbors could give them the virus.

The novel starts of fairly fast, but it’s more thoughtful in the middle portion before becoming action packed towards the end. It’s intriguing  in the same way as life in the US before and during the epidemic that is described, but especially towards the end, the powerful force of humankind trying to achieve oneness while remaining separated begins to propel the story forward. 

The story focuses on a group of people united in their fights to defeat the virus and stave it off from themselves. There is the emotionally broken neighbor, the perfectionist politician, the priest who lambastes the laxity of the people and adapts his sermons to help them find peace, the journalist who gets caught up in the illness and tries to escape, the doctor who treats people out of a sense of duty while his wife is sick in a clinic outside the City and a former veteran who leaves home due to his disgust of the death penalty and who sets up the volunteer force to defeat the pandemic.

It is as exhilarating and thought-provoking as the other Bentley books. It’s one with important lessons from one who is adept at describing complex human issues that have dogged us from the beginning of time with straightforward events and ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Apr 13, 2020

Lynn Bentley

Lynn Bentley is President of Organization Transitions, a consulting firm specializing in executive search and talent management solutions for Fortune 500 clients such as Autonation, Citigroup, DHL, ECI, Federal Express, Knobull.com, Microsoft, Motorola, Oce, Siemens, and Verizon. In addition to over 20 years of consulting success, he previously held executive positions with Daimler Benz, Exxon, Gillette, and Pfizer.

Book preview

Contagion

Prologue

     Dr. Bentham and I stood in front of Providence Place Mall looking at the deserted streets, looking at the smoke rising from the horizon, with looks of wonder on our face. The contagion swept around the world leaving carnage and death in its wake.

     How could a piece of inert matter protected by microscopic fat be so deadly, the doctor said with an ironic tone in his voice.

     The smoke came from the fires being set to destroy medical waste from the hospitals that had been used by the staff working feverishly to help the sick and dying patients! Normal disposal had been overwhelmed so fires had to be used. The fire wiped away the fat leaving the virus defenseless.

     The doctor was working twelve hour shifts at the hospital and seeing patients in their homes. He said, I’m too tired to sleep even though I can barely keep my eyes open right now. We are so understaffed that doctors and nurses are loading body bags with those who have died.

     Down the street from, a middle aged man seemed to struggle as he walked toward us. He was wheezing while coughing loudly into his face mask. He looked like death warmed over and appeared extremely disoriented.

     We need to make sure he doesn’t get within six feet of us. This guy is sick with the virus.

     We got ready to move but the man collapsed when he was about ten feet from us. He was trying to speak just before falling on to the pavement. Because Bentham was a doctor, his first instinct drew him closer to the guy but, remembering that he lacked protection, he held back. The man tried to call for help yet only managed to make a weak croak. We stood and watched as he took his last breath.

     The doctor took out his mobile and called the sanitation center. He said, There is the body of a man who just passed in front of the mall. Yah, most likely he is infected.

     Thankfully we kept our distance doc; do you really have to go back for another twelve hour shift, Ed said with sadness in his voice.

     The shook his head yes, showing humble resignation. He was a handsome, middle aged man with brown, well-groomed hair. He received his medical degree from Brown and served his internship at RI Hospital. His eyes were hazel with a look that cut through any uncertainty. He smiled saying, Keep recording these terrible events so that others can better respond to the next pandemic!

     That was truly my intent but I was not certain that my sense of mission could withstand the onslaught! The smell of acrid smoke set an ominous cloud over our puny existence! I had never felt so lost and overwhelmed. As a young man, I had retained my belief in God but wondere, how such a God could allow this much suffering.

     I found it extremely interesting when the bishop spoke of this emotion. He was reminded, after preaching about God’s anger, of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul wrote that God does not cause difficulties but provides Grace to guide us through tough times which strengthens us. This revelation blew my mind and forever altered my perspective on bad things happening to good people.

     What had always astounded me was the times people told me that the doc and I looked like twins. Our meeting was pure chance brought about by my assignment to research the medical system in RI. We immediately hit it off and got together for lunch a couple times a month.

     The contagion seeped into our community when we thought we could escape the epidemic sweeping most of the country and the world. The President refused to launch a national response because of state’s rights ideology. He thought he could film-flam his way through this crisis like many others. Several countries created the model that successfully leveled the infection rate curve. Unfortunately the US would suffer like other countries that were slow to respond!

     An overwhelming crises is tailored for heroes who rise against all odds to conquer the challenge. I was there to tell the story that captured the heroics of doctors, nurses, counselors, first responders, victims and the survivors. The onslaught changed everyone forever. The answer eluded us all to the overreaching question: Does the good really win out over pain and death.

     Many found a satisfactory answer while most remained totally in the dark!

Chapter 1

    The unusual events described in this story took place throughout the world. Everyone agreed that, considering their somewhat extraordinary circumstances, they were totally lost. For its normalcy, is what strikes one first about the general mood in the US.

     The country, let us admit, is out of control. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture of a country without a moral compass, where you never hear honest explanations is a thoroughly negative place, in short?"

     The baskets of flowers are brought in from the suburbs by the truck load; it’s a spring cried in the marketplaces. During the summer the sun bakes the streets bone-dry, sprinkles our walls with grayish dust, and you have no option but to survive those days of fire indoors, in air conditioned spaces. In autumn, on the other hand, we have deluges of rain. Only the first signs of winter brings welcomed relief.

     Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In Providence, one wonders, is this an effect of the climate? All three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting ahead. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, doing business. Naturally they don’t focus on such simpler pleasures as love-making.

     In the evening, on leaving the office, they show, at an hour that never varies, in the cafes, stroll the same streets, or take the air on their balconies. The passions of the young are violent and short-lived; the vices of older men seldom range beyond an addiction to golf, to banquets and socials, or clubs where large sums change hands on the fall of a card.

     It will be said, no doubt, that these habits are not peculiar to our town; really all our contemporaries are much the same. Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafes and in small-talk what time is left for living. Nevertheless there still exist towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling of something different.

     Hence I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called the act of love, or else settle down to a mild habit of fraternization. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. In the US, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it.

     What is more exceptional in our city is the difficulty one may experience there in dying. Difficulty, perhaps, is not the right word, ‘discomfort" would come nearer. Being ill’s never agreeable but there are people that stand by you, so to speak, when you are sick; in which you can, after a fashion, let yourself go.

     Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of hospital walls all sizzling with fever, while the whole population, sitting in cafes or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts! It will then be obvious what discomfort attends death, even modern death, when it waylays you under such conditions in a baron place.

     These somewhat haphazard observations may give a fair idea of what our city is like. However, we must not exaggerate. Really, all that was to be conveyed was the banality of its appearance and of life in it. But you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits. And since habits are precisely what is encouraged, all is for the best.

     It is only fair to add that the Northeast is grafted on to a unique landscape, ringed with luminous hills and above a perfectly shaped bay.  All we may regret is the region being so disposed that it turns its back on the bay, with the result that it’s close enough to see the sea, you always have to go to look for it.

     Such being the normal life of Providence, it will be easily understood that our fellow citizens had not the faintest reason to apprehend the incidents that took place in the late winter of the year in question. In any case the historian has no claim to competence for a task like this, had not chance put him in the way of gathering much information, and had he not been, by the force of things, closely involved in all that he proposes to describe. This is his justification for playing the part of a historian. Naturally, a historian, even an amateur, always has data, personal or at second hand, to guide him.

     But perhaps the time has come to drop preliminaries and cautionary remarks and to launch into the story. The account of the first days needs to be fully described. When leaving his office on a morning in late February, Dr. Lionel Bentham felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead bat lying in the middle of the driveway.

     On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way to his car. It was not until he noticed a neighbor’s reaction to the news that he realized the peculiar nature of his discovery. Personally, he had thought the presence of the dead bat on the street, no more than that; the neighbor, however, was genuinely outraged. In vain the doctor assured him that there was trash, presumably discarded, on several areas of the neighborhood. There wasn’t any trash in the yards, he repeated, so someone must have brought this one from outside. Some youngsters were trying to be funny, most likely.

     That evening, when he was standing in the entrance, feeling for the key in his pocket before starting into to his house, he saw a hooded figure coming toward him from the dark end of the passage. It moved uncertainly, and he was sopping wet.

     He wasn’t thinking about the bat. That glimpse of a night prowler had switched his thoughts back to something that had been on his mind all day. His wife, who had been ill for a year now, was due to leave next day for a clinic in the AZ mountains. He found her lying down in the bedroom, resting, as he had asked her to do, in view of the exhausting journey before her. She gave him a smile.

     Do you know? I’m feeling ever so much better! she said. The doctor gazed down at the face that turned toward him in the glow of the bedside lamp. His wife was thirty, and the long illness had left its mark on her face.

     Next day, at eight o’clock the neighbor button holed the doctor as he was going out. Our neighbor down the street is very sick, he said. The neighbor had lingered in the doorway for quite a while, keeping a sharp eye on the passers-by, on the off chance that those passing by would give themselves away by coughing or by some facetious remark. His watch had been in vain.

     The doctor decided to begin his round in the old part of the city, where his poorer patients lived. The scavenging in these districts was done late at night and, as he drove his car along the straight, dirty streets, he cast glances at the garbage cans aligned along the edge of the sidewalk. In one street alone the doctor counted as many as a dozen overturned barrels with vegetable and other refuse in the street.

     He found his first patient, an asthma case of long standing, in bed, in a room that served as both dining-room and bedroom and overlooked the street. The invalid was an old Italian with a hard, rugged face. Placed on the coverlet in front of him were two pots containing dried peas. When the doctor entered, the old man was sitting up, bending his neck back, gasping and wheezing in his efforts to recover his breath.

     Well, doctor, he said, while the injection was being made, they’re coming out, have you noticed?

      The bats, he means, his wife explained. The man next door saw three.

     They’re coming out, you can see them in all the neighborhoods. It’s disgusting!

     Bentham soon discovered that the bats were the great topic of conversation in that part of the town. After his round of visits he drove home.

     There was a call for you, sir, the nanny informed him.

     The doctor asked him if he’d seen any more vandalism.

     No, the nanny replied, there ain’t been any more. I’m keeping a sharp lookout, you know. Those youngsters wouldn’t dare when I’m around.

     His would be leaving soon in a tailor-made suit, and he noticed that she had used rouge. He smiled to her.

     That’s splendid, he said. You’re looking very nice.

     A few minutes later he was seeing her into the sleeping-car. She glanced round the compartment.

     It’s too expensive for us really, isn’t it?

     "It had to be