It lasted a week or it lasted a couple of weeks, or it came
and then it went, only to come back stronger or weaker. But the point isn’t
really how long it lasted, because one thing about disease is that it distorts
time. Or perhaps it has its own time, one in which the watches and the clocks
and the places you have to go and the people you have to see get replaced by
the joints, which are being broken by torturers who could have taught tricks to
the Chinese, or the wet bedclothes at three in the morning, since the fever has
burned all the fluids out of you. And where are you now? In suspended time,
freezing, sopping wet, and too tired and too afraid to get out of bed into the
tropical night, since 75 degrees with a gentle night breeze will feel like
Wisconsin, February, at seven AM standing on Park Street, as the wind courses
off Lake Mendota.
It was, when I was able to think about it at all, somewhat
like the anteroom to AIDS. There were the fevers of about 105 degrees, which
coupled with being alone, produced a fear and a disorientation that was as
divorced from reality…wait, it WAS reality. Because the Marc who was
essentially driven by his mind—the body being completely happy to be steered
and sped along as needed—had become his body, which at this point was falling
apart at the speed of a nuclear fission.
In moments like, people are likely to come home—people whose
body has been doing what the body should be doing, which is carry the
brain / mind around effortlessly—these people tend to come home and bring
wisdom from a land once inhabited but now deserted, sere, converted into a
lunar landscape. And what do these people say?
“You have to eat,” they say. And wouldn’t that be logical,
if any food tasted anything like it used to, or even if it didn’t, if it tasted
something like how you remembered food to taste? Then there’s the
question—lifting the fork to the mouth is something that Schwarzenegger could
have done in his heavy-training days, but Marc? Whose total energy is being
consumed by shivering, since the difference between the 98 degrees outside my
body and the 105 degrees inside my body has produced copious sweating and
shivering.
“Just eat that side of beef,” says Mr. Fernández, “and then
you can start in on the four or five industrial sized pots of soup I’ve made
you. And what did you have for lunch?”
What did I have for lunch? OK—ask me an easy one, for
starters, such as ‘what is the Max Planck Constant and what is its role in the
history of modern physics?’
Fortunately, Mr. Fernández is among the oldest of several
siblings, which means he has years of reasoning with the less robust minded. So
he’s well equipped to say things for which there are no good answers. How’s
this: “well, how do you expect to get better if you don’t eat?” Or this, a personal
favorite: “well, you have to go the doctor, you know….”
And why do I have to go the doctor? Because the doctor will
say hugely important words, which are to go home, rest, take Tylenol for pain. And
then wait until the virus decide to go somewhere else and mess with them.
Oh—and further crucial advice: drink lots of fluids.
All of this, min d you, started because a mosquito who
presented a particularly vicious and venomous visage decided to bite me,
knowing full well that he was harboring the Chikungunya virus: Chikungunya in
this case being a Malaysian world meaning (Wikipedia’s definition) “bent
doubled over” or (my version) “you’re completely fucked.”
And so the world staggered on for about two weeks and guess
what? However much I berate myself for doing a singularly bad job of keep the
world in some reasonable order, it now appears that things really do
mess up when I stray from the job. That little situation in Gaza—it certainly
didn’t get any better. Oh, and it turns out that we’re back to bombing Iraq.
Even worse, we have a white cop in a predominantly black community of Missouri,
and what does the cop do? Take the kid out better than any of Capone’s boys
ever did in Chicago a century ago. Oh, and when the community—rather
thin-skinned of them, but whoever said working with the public was any
picnic—protested, what was the reaction?
“It made the dear 60’s seem kind of quaint,” I remarked to
Mr. Fernández last night, since we’ve graduated back from
statements-reasoning-with-a-three-year-old to something like normal adult
discourse. Because in the old days, the cops had Billy clubs, yes, and
canisters of tear gas. Right—there wasn’t much to be done about the Billy
clubs, but everybody knew that a handkerchief soaked in vinegar would get you through
the worst of the tear gas. But now?
What happened, at least what I saw on YouTube this morning,
was an army mobilizing against an enemy, which in this case was the community
it was supposed to serve. I’m what passes for white, getting to the age where a
cane will become my third leg, and speak the language of respect—as in how to
get people to give it to you. But if I were young, poor, and black?
I’d be terrified.
It seemed that a week or two in bed with breaking bones
might have been the better alternative than a week or two seeing Ferguson Missouri
burn. I shuddered, scowled, and turned to Monteverdi.
At least it was better than Taking Tylenol, getting lots of
rest, and drinking lots of fluid…..
