4 parts of a plague

I’ve been thinking about plague as a metaphor for loneliness or depression. How the creeping dread of some new infection can pass unwittingly from person to person. A bit like the aftermath of grief or the complications from any relationship.

Writing about disease is nothing new. In fiction, it’s a little passé, the big wave of sickness novels came in droves a decade or so ago and after the pandemic, there has been no shortage of tales on sickness and its impact on society. Still, those stories have their appeal. In Karen Russell’s Novella Sleep Donation, nobody can sleep, and insomnia runs rampant distorting reality until it kills. Which is a counter to Karen Thompson Walker’s novel In the Age of Dreamers, a coming-of-age story following a young girl and her family struggling to survive in a world slowly besieged by dreams.

In other cases, disease is a metaphor for nostalgia or at least a vehicle to explore it. Severance by Ling Ma explores a world overtaken by an incurable disease that causes people to get stuck in loops: rehashing robotically the actions they did in the past.

There’s Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez which I’ve always wanted to read but never actually have, Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel tackles how communities stay together, Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg focuses on the loss that comes with sickness, and of course the literal entire history of queer people during the Aids crisis.

Anyway, disease is everywhere. And I’ve had an earlier story focused on disease that I’ve been rewriting over the years, so here are some bits, pieces, and ideas that could make it into that story eventually.

I. a meeting

Michael had a theory that we fall in love with the people we’re meant to at that moment in our lives. We love them the way we know how, he used to say, not always the way we’re meant to.

I didn’t buy it. I thought he was trying to be wiser than he was. A play at being 25. Or maybe just being 25. After all, who was he meant to love that summer before the plague, if not me?

I never loved anyone at the right time. It was always inconvenient: the spring before they went abroad or the winter before they graduated. There was no real reason why. Though I speculate loudly about it when I am drunk. 

When we met I had only been with three other men: my ex, a drunken hookup, and the ginger with the dirty apartment. Not because I was a purist or ugly. I was too nervous to invite men over. I sweated too much and stumbled over my words and rarely lacked the anxiety necessary to have simple sex.

Our first winter together we got too drunk at a Christmas party and went home with another couple. Midway through he excused himself to the bathroom, a side effect of his sudden bloody nose which happened sometimes during sex, when he was flustered, or when the altitude was too high. When he returned, he tried to work his way back in but was rebuffed. Motionless and buzzed, speckled with his blood, I did not care who was on top of me, I simply wished the room would stop spinning.

II. before a plague

Before the plague, he broke up with me. 1

It didn’t phase me. I knew it was only a matter of time before he left. He didn’t have a reason. He wasn’t leaving and neither was I. Still, we broke up. Two weeks later he asked to meet back up and exchange the things we left behind. I came back with a box of books, a pack of American spirits, and some odd trinkets he left in my bedroom closet. He brought me a pillow and a set of sheets to replace the ones he ruined.

I wasn’t surprised by how little of yourself you could leave behind. It’s easy to leave no trace when you’re trying. The men I loved left so much of themselves behind: a contact lens, a chewed-on guitar pick, a Spanish dictionary, and a fashion doll with matted hair. I never kept them long. Tossing them when I could, Moving away when I couldn’t.

III. plague

When the plague came we burned our cities and cleared our crops. Smoke plumes blocked the sky and sun in thick wisps of shadow, and coated the land in a sheet of ice that failed to thaw. It took hold in phases: first a fever and then the nausea. Then, the overwhelming sense of doom; the radical realization that everything you have loved is a fragile and delicate thing, teetering on the edge, afraid of breaking. Finally, the boils and the scars, the purple pox mark that desecrated flesh and drove us all apart.

There was no cure that we could find. In time, they said, it would go away: the memory of it crashing through you like white-peaked waves after a ship’s passing. Grief, or what was left of it, was a cherished thing. After the plague was over, we would need it to rebuild. There’s always a rebuilding, they said, always a next step forward. At least until there isn’t.

IV. a rebuilding

When the plague finished I made a new home in the northwest mountains to start again. He never called. But neither did I. Neither did the man before him. There was nothing much to say: I didn’t die, I’m fine, I met a man and then another and another and another.

During the plague, there were so many men willing and available. So many open hearts desperate for connection. Each of them hoping to leave something tangible behind. 

I lost a bit of myself in the vortex of it all. The desperate calls and texts, the endless stream of infatuation and desire. There were men who believed in God and listened to EDM, and others who only knew me as a coworker or customer, or a lightly filtered image on a dating app.

At the time I wondered how anyone could be so willing. So eager to consume or be consumed. But, to be fair, they weren’t the ones living through a plague.