Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Sean Gardner: Well, my wife said it was the video games.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Beyond the prodromal phase, the sensory-excitation phase is characterized by hypersalivation, muscle twitches, insomnia, extreme aggression, and a compulsion to bite or chew.

Once incubation of the disease is complete and the subject exhibits suspect behaviors, there is no treatment. The third and final stage of the disease is paralysis and coma. Subsequent autopsy will reveal antigens when rabies antibodies are applied to samples of brain tissue and examined under a fluorescence microscope.

Denise Gardner: During the worst of it, Sylvia Leonard calls. She's the mother of Dean Leonard, one of Margot's little goth pals. Well, anyway, Sylvia phones and says, hi ho, Dean's pet bat has just croaked. The little fuzzball's been curled up in Dean's underwear drawer, and today it reeks to high heaven. Dead. And Sylvia wants to know: Did Margot's bat get sick? Sylvia wants to know: Did we save the sales receipt, and can she use our receipt to try and get a refund for her dead bat?

We pull the shoe box out from under Margot's bed, and the stink could knock you over. We don't even open the lid. Sean, my husband, Sean just totes the box into the backyard and buries Little Monty with every other gerbil and hamster and kitten and goldfish and lizard, parakeet, guinea pig, mouse, and rabbit that Margot ever begged and pleaded to have. You'd swear, our backyard is paved with dead animals.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: The word itself comes from the Sanskrit word, used three thousand years before the birth of Christ, rabhas, which means "to do violence." By the nineteenth century, the virus was prevalent in all parts of the world, especially Europe. There, people who feared they'd become infected would usually commit suicide.

Those infected, or even rumored to be infected, were often murdered by their peers, out of fear. Or sympathy.

Historically, the virus has moved through a series of mammal reservoirs. In the 1700s, the disease was carried predominantly by red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), and gained a foothold in the New World when these animals were imported for British-style fox hunts. During the 1800s, the striped skunk(Mephitis mephitis) was so likely to be hydrophobic that the popular slang term for skunks of that period was "Phobey Cats." After the 1960s, the common raccoon (Procyon lotor) became the species most likely to be infected. To a lesser degree, the coyote (Canis latrans) is responsible for an average of fifty infections annually. Insectivorous bats, an average of 750 infections annually.

Before the advent of the Rant serotype of the Lyssavirus, no more than a hundred thousand people died of rabies each year, primarily in tropical or subtropical regions. Despite an annual expenditure of one billion dollars to contain the disease, and a century of vaccinations and public awareness, the infection rate among animals reached a historical peakin 1993.

Due to the epidemic attributed to Buster Casey, human beings are currently the largest mammal reservoir of the rabies virus.

Sean Gardner: As I understand it, you have two types of rabies. There's your «dumb» type, where you never go insane and bite anyone. You only curl up in a ball under your bed and die. And there's the normal kind of rabies, the «furious» type, which 80 percent of folks get. Where you slobber and swear and flail around, smashing everything in your bedroom, including your Dolls of the World collection, and calling your father a "dirty, shit-eating, motherfucking, dickless dickhead…" Well, that's what kind of rabies our Margot had.

Denise Gardner: Shame on us, but I think we started to mourn Margot the day she turned thirteen and first dyed her hair black.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: One can argue that all early prohibitions to bestiality were intended to prevent the Lyssavirus, or any disease, from jumping to human beings.

Ancient cultures also warned that bastard offspring of a priest would become werewolves. As would any children produced by incest.

Denise Gardner: Shame on me, but when I first suspected, when I had my first inkling that Margot might have rabies, I wrote it off as playacting. Watching Margot and her clique of goth friends, they made such a point to be rude and outlandish. It seemed too much, as if their fondest dream was to have rabies. Well, like I said, shame on me.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Once the virus begins replicating and is transported along sensory and motor nerves, the infected subject can remain asymptomatic for months, despite shedding virus and infecting additional subjects. That scenario appears to be the case with the alleged superspreader, Buster Casey.