The saga of Tuberculosis Andy — the guy who flew to Europe to get married but carried along with him a case of untreatable TB then snuck back into the country in a rent-a-car and disclosed that his dad works at the Center for Disease Control (where he works with TB, imagine that) — makes me hark to that unreadable doorstep of an existential novel, The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, where the hero/protagonist, Hans Castorp, wastes away in a Swiss sanitarium from ennui and consumption, going nowhere fast.
Hans was nowhere nearly as mobile, and indeed, was happy to sit around with a thermometer in his mouth. This flurry of news has the makings of a great thriller: border crossings, virulent untreatable diseases, government agencies. Mann wouldn’t know what to do with the plot.
