The Rattling

I was five years old the first time I watched my mother scrub a doorframe with vinegar until her knuckles bled. She never told me why. I've spent forty years as a professional historian, trained to chase down every fact I can get my hands on, and it took me until my thirties to go looking for the answer to that one.

Some records you avoid on purpose.

What I Remember

Fragments, mostly. That's what childhood gives you instead of history.

I remember being kept indoors for what felt like a season, though the Records Hall tells me it was closer to six weeks. I remember a neighbor's door marked in chalk, a small tally mark none of the other children would explain to me. I remember the smell of vinegar and boiled onion skins, which District Nine mothers used because they had nothing better and needed to believe it helped.

Mostly I remember that nobody used Old Man Perra's bakery for almost two months, and that felt like the actual end of the world to a five-year-old.

I did not understand, at the time, that I was living through District Nine's worst epidemic in living memory. I understood it a great deal better once I'd read the coroner's ledgers as an adult, which is a sentence I wish I could say about fewer parts of my own childhood.

The Rattling

The culprit, once the Registry finally traced it, was a gnat no bigger than a fleck of ash. Cindergnats, they're called now, though nobody had a name for them before District Nine did. They breed in stagnant gear-oil runoff and coal-ash puddles, which the lower districts have never lacked, and they bite in the same close, careless way any gnat does.

The bite itself is nothing. A small blackened welt, easily mistaken for a true cinder burn from the works, gone in a day.

What it leaves behind is not nothing. Within a week, the bitten develop a swelling in the throat and lungs that produces a distinctive wet, rattling cough, the kind that carries through a tenement wall. That cough is the actual danger. Once it settles into a person's lungs, the Rattling no longer needs a gnat to spread. It spreads person to person, in shared troughs and stacked-close rooms and the simple bad luck of breathing the same air, and District Nine in those years was built for exactly that kind of closeness.

It moved through six blocks in under two months. The Registry's numbers, which I have independently verified against three separate ledgers because I did not want to believe the first one, put the dead past four hundred.

There was no cure. There still isn't one on record, though I understand a few healers in the lower districts have begun experimenting with something derived from the boiled-onion remedy my own mother swore by, which may turn out to have been onto something after all, given enough time and enough desperation to try anything twice.

What there was, instead, was quarantine. Entire tenement rows sealed and later condemned rather than reoccupied, because nobody wanted to test whether the Cindergnats had truly left the old runoff behind them. Walk District Nine today and you'll still find those blocks standing empty, balconies boarded, windows dark. Most residents will tell you it's simply old construction nobody bothered to fix.

I know better. I was there for the six weeks that built it.

I offer this entry, then, not as detached scholarship, which is usually my preferred distance from a subject, but as the one thing I can give the four hundred: a record that says plainly what happened to them, and why the empty buildings in my own home district are not simply neglect.

They are a grave that never got a headstone. Now, at least, they have a footnote.