by Sigrid Nunez
When the second wave hit, everyone hoped it, too, would be mild. A hope that died by the end of the first week.
Later many people would say that if the schools had been closed right away, lives might have been saved. But at the time people argued that you couldn’t just close the schools, because so many parents worked. If they had to stay home to take care of their kids, a lot of them would lose income, maybe even their jobs. Not to mention that businesses were already shorthanded because of all the employees out sick. Closing the schools might just make things worse.
But even before schools were officially closed, many parents had started keeping their kids home. Because teachers were getting sick, too, and there weren’t enough subs, classes had to be combined.
“How stupid can you get?” a teacher who’d been fired for refusing to go in to work told reporters. “Anywhere people are crowded together is bad, but with school kids we’re talking about a perfect storm of contagion.”
From Addy in Berlin came the news that all social gatherings had been banned except for weddings and funerals, where the number of people could not be higher than twelve. (“I wonder if that’s counting the bride and groom,” Cole’s mother said, and his father joked: “How about the corpse?”)
In city after city, all over the world, the number of people appearing in surgical masks kept multiplying. Those still capable of frivolity added illustrations: luscious lips, stuck-out tongues, piano-keyboard smiles, and—most popular—vampire fangs. In Indianapolis, after hundreds of people fell ill over one weekend, no one was permitted to go out without a mask. But—as happened almost everywhere—there weren’t enough masks to go around. Some made do with scarves or other pieces of cloth, or they tried taping gauze or paper to their faces. A lot of people just ignored the rule—and got away with it, the police being out sick in droves.
But a homeless man caught spitting in the street was mobbed and beaten to death.
The day before Cole’s school finally closed was spooky. The halls had never been so quiet. The sound of a ball being bounced in the school yard was like the sound of a heavy door slamming. And when the bell rang, everyone nearly jumped out of their skin.
Cole’s last day of school turned out to be his father’s last day of school, too.
When the first college students started getting sick, some health officials called for nationwide campus quarantines. They warned that letting all those active young people—many of whom were already infected, though they might not know it yet—travel around the country, using all means of public transportation, would spread a disease that seemed to be growing more contagious by the hour. Much safer for them to stay put. A drastic measure, to be sure. But the rate of infection among college students was turning out to be drastically high—higher than any other group except prison inmates. Cancel classes and all other school business, these officials urged, but please keep those kids in the dorms.
The outrage with which students reacted to this proposal was matched by the outrage of their parents, who wanted their sons and daughters home now. So, leaving only those already too sick to get out of bed, the campuses began emptying out.
Not that any dormitory anywhere would remain empty for long. Most would be turned into makeshift clinics as hospitals started running out of beds.
Had his father killed another dog? No, it was just his expression.
Coming home that other time his father had explained how, out of nowhere, a dog had dashed in front of his car. “All I could do was run over the poor thing,” he said. He had looked shocked and awed, and for a while after, whenever he caught sight of Sadie, he’d mirror her own sad-eyed long face.
This time, though, it was the flu that had his father looking shocked and awed. The flu, which was now officially the only thing anyone could think about, the only topic of conversation. In less than a week, it had knocked half the student body flat. The lives of kids in perfect health just days ago now hung in the balance. Two freshmen and one sophomore had died.
The dude flu, people called it, as more and more young adults were taken down.
“Not to scare anyone,” his father said, “but I’m not feeling so hot myself.” Cole noticed that his father’s skin looked dirty, smudged in places, as if he’d rubbed himself down with a sheet of newspaper. “I don’t have a fever but I feel like I’ve been hit over the head or something.”
“Oh my god.” Cole’s mother looked as if she’d been hit over the head pretty hard herself. “Don’t touch Cole. Go upstairs. I’ll call the doctor. Go straight to bed.”
Without a word—like a sleepwalker, or someone obeying a hypnotist—his father turned and left the room.
“Don’t go near your father. Don’t touch him.”
Why were his parents behaving like bots? His mother held her arms stiffly at her sides. She held her eyes so wide open Cole thought it must hurt. He thought of the pod people in the famous old movie whose name he couldn’t remember. The way his father had climbed the stairs. They were changing—everything was changing.
Later, people would always say how everything had happened so fast—overnight, they said. But Cole would remember the feeling of dragging a ball and chain, of days unfolding in excruciating slow motion.
“I’ll go call the doctor. Keep away from your father. Stay down here. Keep away from our room.”
“Okay, Mom, I heard you the first time.”
Cole turned on the TV. Not that he expected to find anything besides news about the flu. As he touched the remote power button, he remembered that the movie was called Invasion of the Body Snatchers and how one of his teachers had said it proved you didn’t need to show a lot of violence to make a great scary movie. But Cole thought only a Neanderthal would find a clunky old black-and-white movie like that seriously scary.
He wondered how long school would be closed. Not that he missed it. In fact, it had disgusted him that his parents had made him keep going. It had not escaped his notice that it was mostly the cooler kids whose parents had let them stay home, even if they weren’t sick. Kaleigh, for example, had been one of the first to stop coming to school. Had this not been the case, of course, Cole would not have wanted to stay home himself.
Now he just wished there were some way to delete the last time they’d seen each other.
She had caught him staring (usually he was more careful). “Why don’t you just take a picture?” Loud, on purpose, so that half the cafeteria would hear. And stupidly he had shot back: “Why would I want a picture of you?” Not fooling anyone, of course. And then Kaleigh whispered something to the other kids at her table, something that made them all go “Ooooo.”
Every day since then he had relived it, trying, at least in fantasy, to fix it. But he could never think of what to say. As usual, he couldn’t imagine what the cool response would have been. He just knew it existed: the response that instead of making her sneer would have made Kaleigh like him.
And now he wished he had had the nerve to sneak-take her picture, even though kids caught doing that got their cells confiscated. He couldn’t remember what clothes she’d been wearing that last time, but he remembered her hands. Only a short time ago he would have found green nail polish ugly. He would have found the stud Kaleigh wore in her nose vomitous. There were days when for some reason she had dark circles under her eyes. He knew they were supposed to be ugly (his mother hated it whenever she had them), but now they, too, were somehow attractive—one of those things, like the silver nose stud and the metallic green nails, that he liked looking at when Kaleigh was there and thinking about when she wasn’t.
Whenever he saw or thought about those circles under her eyes, he wanted to kiss her there—even after he heard Pete Druzzi say, “When a chick’s got circles under her eyes it means she’s wearing the red mouse.”
But by now his secret hope had been crushed. He’d held on to it for as long as he could, the hope that here, in this new town, among all new kids, things would be different from the way they’d bee
n in Chicago. Where the apocalyptic girls had looked right through him.
“Oh, those damn girls,” his mother fumed. “Every school has them. Cold, mean, narcissistic, and usually dumb. They should never be allowed to get away with their destructive behavior. But trust me, Cole, they’re not worth suffering over.”
His mother was so wrong. Kaleigh wasn’t dumb. She was one of the best students in the class, and already focused on getting into a good college. She was going to be an obstetrician. She already knew that. And she wasn’t mean. Cliquish, yes, but not mean. She just didn’t like boys staring at her. He could understand that. And everyone knew she was kind. They knew it because of Mr. Henderson, the Spanish teacher. Middle-aged, married “Hairpiece” Henderson. He was in love with her and unable to hide it. His heart was breaking for her and he couldn’t hide it. Scream! Everyone knew, and everyone wanted to make something of it. But just try. Just try making fun of Mr. Henderson in front of Kaleigh.
“Oh my god, Cole. How awful!”
He had slid down on the couch with his head back and had been staring at the ceiling instead of at the screen. He had never turned up the volume.
There they were again: the men in the hazmat suits. Not chickens or pigs this time but people. Corpses. Laid out in rows. Being swung onto a gigantic pyre.
“I can’t watch this,” his mother said, gasping as if someone had just knocked the wind out of her. Cole shrugged and turned the TV off.
He didn’t want her to sit down on the sofa next to him, but she did. He didn’t want her to put her arm around him, but she did. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to go up to his room. He didn’t want to talk, but he knew she would. Why did she always do the wrong thing?
Now that his father was sick she was all upset. His father, whom she was secretly planning to dump. (“The truth is, Addy, I feel like I’ve done my duty. I don’t owe this man the rest of my life.”)
She hadn’t been able to reach the doctor. He was just a name to her: Dr. Corbutt. The only primary-care doctor in the area still taking new patients enrolled in the college’s insurance plan. She had reached a recording saying people who thought they had the flu should not come into the office or go to the hospital. They should stay home instead and call a certain number. But when she tried calling that number it was busy.
“Of course, we don’t know for sure if it even is the flu,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll try again later. Let’s talk about dinner. I’m afraid it’s slim pickin’s.”
Very long ago, it seemed, he’d been sent home from school with a pamphlet about Emergency Home Preparedness. Every home should always have on hand at least a three-week supply of food, water, and medication for each member of the family.
“But there’s frozen pizza. You like that. I could heat up some vegetable soup, and we could have that with the pizza. Would you like that, sweetie?”
Something was being shredded inside him.
He wasn’t afraid of the flu anymore. He wasn’t afraid of everyone dying. He believed his parents when they said they weren’t going to die. They were made of sturdy stuff. None of them would die. They would all go on living, day after day, in the same dumb, totally fucked-up way.
“Cole! What is it, Cole?”
Why did it always sound more loving when she said his name than when she called him sweetie or pumpkin?
“Are you scared, Cole? No? Then what is it? Are you homesick? Do you miss your old school? Are you afraid you won’t make any friends here? Come on, Cole. Words, remember?”
He remembered. She used to say it all the time when he was small. “Words, Cole, words. I’m not a mind reader. But if you give me the words, I’ll bet I can make the bad go away.”
And it was true! It had worked—then.
Rather than cry, he swore he would gouge his own eyes out.
Imagine you swallowed an empty balloon and then somehow it started inflating.
He didn’t want to bury his face in her neck and ball his fists and sob and sob till he got the hiccups like some fucking five-year-old. But once he had done that, he felt better.
He still didn’t want to talk. But he sat in the kitchen and kept his mother company while she heated the soup and the pizza. And then they ate together in peace.
THE NEXT MORNING his father was able to sit up in bed for an hour or so and work on his laptop. He was able to eat breakfast but refused lunch, saying he didn’t think he could keep it down. By afternoon all he could do was sleep.
His mother kept calling both the doctor’s office and the special number she’d been given but without getting through to either.
Cole was forbidden to enter the sickroom. From time to time, if he saw the door open, he’d stop and linger awkwardly in the doorway.
“You okay, Dad?”
“I’ll survive, kiddo. Don’t forget to wash your hands.”
His mother, on the other hand, spent much of the day in the room, and at night she slept there, not in the bed but on a yoga mat on the floor. She used a cotton scarf for a mask—a blue bandanna that she wore to keep her hair back when she did yoga—and washed her hands so often they were becoming raw. She worried about his father’s fever but couldn’t say how high it was, the thermometer being one of several items that had managed somehow to get lost in the move from Chicago. And there were no more thermometers to be found at the drugstore.
And once they’d used up the aspirin they had on hand, that was it. Like surgical masks and thermometers, cold and flu medication had run out everywhere. Rubbing alcohol, mouthwash, bleach—anything containing germ killer was also sold out. Except, of course, online. The Web was full of ads not only for ordinary meds like aspirin but for a million products promising to prevent or cure flu.
A mine of misinformation.
Bloggers around the world swore by the power of this or that herb: holy basil, astragalus, elderberry.
If you drank a certain tea, if you ate a certain root, if you practiced meditation every day, if you took mega doses of Vitamin D, you would not get sick.
Rub yourself down with onion or garlic. Take garlic pills, chew garlic, carry garlic cloves in your pockets. Try acupuncture.
A positive psychological outlook was essential, and the more good deeds a person performed, the less likely he or she was to get infected.
Because the second wave was so much more severe than the first, a lot of people refused to believe it could be the same disease. It had to be terrorism. They didn’t care what medical experts kept telling them, about how it was the nature of influenza to occur in waves and that there was nothing about this pandemic, terrible though it was, that wasn’t happening more or less as had long been predicted.
No, not bioterrorism, others said, but a virus that had escaped from a laboratory. These were the same people who believed that both Lyme disease and West Nile virus were caused by germs that had escaped many years ago from a government lab off the coast of Long Island. They scoffed at the assertion that it was impossible to say for sure where the flu had begun because cases had appeared in several different countries at exactly the same time. Cover-up! Everyone knew the government was involved in the development of bioweapons. And although the Americans were not the only ones who were working on such weapons, the belief that they were somehow to blame—that the monster germ had most likely been created in an American lab, for American military purposes—would outlive the pandemic itself.
In any case, according to a poll, eighty-two percent of Americans believed the government knew more about the flu than it was saying. And the number of people who declared themselves dead set against any vaccine the government came up with was steadily growing.
Just before she fell sick, the president addressed the nation.
“We have reached the point where our hospitals, clinics, and other health centers are overwhelmed. Communities everywhere are struggling with a shortage of health care workers, not only because of the many who are out sick but because of those who are quitting their jobs or refusi
ng to show up for work. While the fear these workers must feel is understandable, our survival depends on them, and so we command all those whose duty it is to care for the sick not to shirk that duty. Your country needs you. At the end of the day, when this peril is behind, you will be remembered as America’s heroes. Your courage and sacrifice will never be forgotten. And those who abandon their posts today should bear in mind that neither will this be forgotten. A day of reckoning will come.
“At this time we also call on all able-bodied retired doctors, nurses, and others trained in health care to volunteer their services. Some have already done so, and we praise and thank these fine people. But the need for skilled hands grows more urgent every day, and their number remains far too few.
“Finally, we call on all ordinary citizens to do their part. Who will take care of the sick if not their own family, friends, and neighbors? We are hearing far too many stories of people running away, leaving deathly ill loved ones behind. There have been heartbreaking reports of flu victims who might have survived had there only been someone to fetch them water.
“My fellow Americans, I ask you not to turn your backs on one another in this hour of need. Volunteer to help out in your communities in whatever way you can. Knock on your neighbor’s door and see if there is someone trapped and helpless who needs you.
“In many areas of the country, flu victims have been instructed not to go to the hospital but to wait for a visiting doctor or nurse to come to their homes. And yet every day we hear of new instances of people besieging emergency rooms and, in some cases, resorting to violence. Police, whose own ranks have been stretched thin, and who might be providing other emergency aid, have had their hands full protecting our hospitals and pharmacies. National Guard troops who might be delivering food and other necessities to places where they are in short supply have been engaged instead in a constant battle against rioters and looters.
“Furthermore, we are seeing a proliferation of fraud, one scam after another hatched by criminals seeking to profit from others’ misery. We warn all citizens to beware of those selling counterfeit drugs. While the majority of these substances appear to be harmless, some have sickened and even killed those who have ingested them. We are also seeing a record number of assaults on the Web. It seems hackers have been working overtime to create monster viruses with the sole purpose of unleashing more chaos upon the world. Many businesses, including government offices here in Washington, had planned in the event of a pandemic to have numbers of employees work from home. But now this has become nearly impossible, as major government and business websites have been hit and one branch of the network after another has been shut down.