Code Orange

Mitty returns home Sunday to an apartment building that has a parking attendant, a doorman, and a concierge. The building is secure, and those who live there are wealthy. Mitty and his family enjoy chatting with those who live and work in the building. Mitty also likes that “the minute you got inside your own apartment, though, no sound or vibration of neighbors was there with you; you were separate, yet surrounded” (17). Before he gets started on homework, he stares out at the city he loves, New York City. He admires the fact that New Yorkers do not rely on cars but must walk and be strong enough to carry whatever they need on their backs; they do not have the back seats of cars to rely on like suburbanites have.

In an attempt to help his English grade, Mitty goes to the video store that evening to rent the movie version of Beowulf, even though the store clerk warns him that the movie is nothing like the book. Mitty falls asleep after watching only the first few minutes. When he wakes the next morning, he rationalizes by saying that it was better to get a full night’s rest than to stay up with school stuff.

Luckily, he has a sub for English so he doesn’t have to worry about Beowulf for now. He does some internet research on variola major. “Variola major turned out to be smallpox, a disease Mitty had vaguely heard of,” and that had been “destroyed decades ago”(21). At lunch, Olivia shares what she has learned about typhoid, and Mitty’s friend Derek discusses what his topic, anthrax. Their discussion quickly goes to evil and the types of people who would be capable of evil like the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Olivia remembers what happened on that day, which was only three years prior. She and her family were living in New York then; when terrorists attacked, she was unable to find out if her parents had survived until later that evening.

In biology class, Mr. Lynch gives the students a forty-eight-hour extension. Mitty immediately feels ambitious, sure of his abilities to accomplish anything in that amount of time: “In forty-eight hours, Mitty could probably bring down the government of some small country. He could certainly come up with ten pages of notes…” (27).

He goes to the book store and gets two books: Demon in the Freezer and Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge. At home, he gathers his books and types out a rough draft, not bothering with an outline. He writes about how the virus spread and how symptoms developed. He tries to read a little Beowulf but goes back to his smallpox research, realizing that smallpox was a much worse monster than the monster in Beowulf.

The update at the end of the chapter focuses on how the virus takes over a cell, destroying that cell’s original function. That cell is now dedicated to making more and more infectious copies. Mitty has no idea that the symptoms that he is reading about could be his own symptoms.

When a white powder is delivered to the Senate on February 3, 2004, Derek is riveted by the story and resents having to go to school when news of a possible anthrax attack is breaking. He is disappointed to learn that the powder is not anthrax but ricin, a poison. Olivia invites Mitty to join her after school at the Columbia Medical Library, where they can do more research on their topics.

In English, Mitty is happy he has a sub again. He makes more ambitious promises to himself about finally reading Beowulf that night and doing better than anyone else on the test, since it will be fresh in his mind (due to the gift of procrastination). Mitty continues to work on his smallpox essay, but he still tries to give the least amount of effort possible. However, he enjoys being with Olivia when they go to Columbia after school.

While Olivia looks for books on her topic, Mitty learns more about his. There is no known treatment for smallpox, but he doesn’t worry, since the disease doesn’t exist anymore. Famous people such as Abraham Lincoln and Mozart have had smallpox. The disease decimated Native Americans when the Europeans brought it to America. Even though inoculation was discovered in the 1700s, there were still epidemics up until the 1900s.

Finally, Mitty learns about the people responsible for eliminating smallpox from the world: Donald Henderson and a WHO (World Health Organization) program to eradicate smallpox. Mitty writes, “It would be the first time in the history of the world that people actually got rid of a disease for good” (39). They used ring immunization to accomplish this: every time there was a smallpox outbreak, Henderson and his team would immunize every person within a certain distance of the outbreak, “making an immunized circle that could be miles around[…] That way the circle would create a sort of wall that the virus would bump into” (40). Smallpox disappeared from the world by October 1977.

The update warns: “It was now more than forty-eight hours since Mitty Blake had breathed in the particles of a smallpox scab. And Mitty, like the victims in the smallpox hospitals in 1902, had not been vaccinated” (42).