Ruled Out

By Oskar Rausch, Omar’s former cabin mate and sauna buddy. This is a work of satire and fiction.

A man died this week. He was a diplomat, he was in his sixties, and he had a family who are, at this moment, doing what families do, which is not reading the internet. I will not name him. He does not need me, and I would like to be able to look his relatives in the eye should we ever end up on the same sauna bench.

I am here about the rest of us.

Within an hour of the announcement, my telephone, which I keep for the weather, informed me that he had been poisoned. By the second hour it was radiation. By lunch it was microwaves, the weaponized kind, not the kind that ruins leftover pizza. By dinner a man with a podcast and a ring light had settled on a secret weapon, one so secret that he was able to describe it for forty minutes.

Then came the official word: a chronic illness. He had been sick for a long time, the way people are.

You could hear the disappointment from the porch. A chronic illness has no villain. Nobody has ever made a film about a man pursued through the capitals of Europe by his own lab values.

But I once shared a cabin with a physician, and one picks things up. Omar taught me the phrase “differential diagnosis,” which is a list of everything that might be killing you, ranked by likelihood. I have reviewed the internet’s list, and I notice our amateur toxicologists left something off.

The man had been living in America.

Consider the exposure. For the length of his posting he resided within driving distance of American hospitals. Polonium requires a nuclear reactor and a teapot. A directed-energy weapon requires, I am told, a van. The American healthcare system requires only that you feel unwell on a Tuesday.

In the manner of the podcast man, I present The Evidence.

• Polonium. Rare, expensive, and traceable to the reactor it came from. Sooner or later somebody answers for it.
• The microwave weapon. Investigated for a decade by serious people who still cannot agree that it exists.
• The American hospital. Exists. Has a gift shop.

Here is how the third one operates. You wait nine hours in a chair designed by someone who hates chairs. You are seen for eleven minutes, six of which the doctor spends facing a computer, because the computer is the one who gets paid. You are given a drug that quarrels with your other drug, by people who are excellent and exhausted and were never told about the other drug, since that record lives in a different system and the two systems communicate by fax. You go home at nine at night with eleven pages of instructions and something you did not arrive with. Three weeks later the bill comes, an itemized document that has been known to stop a heart unassisted.

No intelligence service has ever built anything like it, and they have budgets. The difference is in the follow-up. When a spy harms you, there is an inquiry. When the system harms you, there is a survey. How likely are you to recommend us to friends and family?

Now, the facts, because Omar insists on them. I know nothing about this man’s medical care and I am inventing nothing about it. What was reported is that when he became seriously ill, he went home to be treated, among his own people and in his own language. I cannot tell you whether that was a medical decision. I can tell you it is the one I would make.

Americans do not have that option. For them, home is the place with the fax machine.

I do understand the hunger for a weapon. A weapon means somebody meant it. The alternative is that a person can simply get sick, slowly, with no one to blame, and that the building you would go to for help runs on a staffing shortage, a billing department, and nobody’s intent at all. That is far more frightening than polonium. Polonium at least has to be signed out.

So rest well, sir, and my condolences to your family, who deserve a quieter week than the one they got.

As for the rest of us: the secret weapon was never secret. It has a parking structure. It validates.