VIRAL

I CAME DOWN with an awful virus a month ago that was apparently the same one everybody else had had (fever of a hundred and two, achiness, headache, loss of appetite, exhaustion, depression, a feeling of being wasted—a feeling that life is meaningless and banal and the world is stalked by relentless evil and confused by greed and narcissism and that beauty and humor are helpless to rescue it), because whenever the phone rang and I dragged myself over to answer it and the person at the other end said “How are you?,” if I mentioned my illness, the person said “Oh, that’s what I had three weeks ago.” Not exactly the comfort that the Apostle Paul tells Christians to give to us afflicted persons, but in my condition I wasn’t expecting much. I felt like death on toast.

The virus appeared as a dryness in the throat on a Tuesday afternoon, and I dosed it with aquavit, the water of life. Wednesday, I stayed in bed. I lay there in dull misery all week and slept and perspired and drank water and lost eight pounds. Outdoors, it was cold and gloomy. After a week, I felt even worse, and called the doctor, who said, “That sure sounds like this virus that’s going around.” He recommended that I stay in bed, exactly the course of treatment that a doctor of 1789 would have prescribed, minus the leeches, but I felt drained already. I couldn’t remember feeling worse since a virus years ago when I was still a smoker and not even a sore throat and nausea and chest congestion could keep me from reaching for a Camel. I lit it and inhaled deeply and coughed for a few minutes and took another drag. That was worse. This was misery, but that was disgusting.

In bed, propped up with three pillows but still sagging, I read a few pounds of magazines with nothing funny or interesting in them, drank quarts of grapefruit and orange juice, and ate raw carrots. I attempted to read the Times, my daily habit—a sacred duty to Mrs. Moehlenbrock, my old teacher. Mrs. Moehlenbrock did not assign us children to delve into the sort of newspapers with big black headlines about “CRAZED BEAST RIPS LUNCH FROM TOT’S HAND,” or some such. She was an educator, and believed that everyone should know the names of all the Cabinet members and what makes the rain fall and where the Seychelles are; she was a Times woman at heart. But day after day, sick with a hopeless virus, I picked up the newspaper and felt like a teacher with an armload of sophomore term papers. The Times was full of dim, dumb articles with titles like “FIBER-OPTIC CALLING TO JAPAN STARTS TODAY,” “SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS: A TOOL FOR TEACHING,” “TREND IN PREGNANCIES CHALLENGES EMPLOYERS,” “PAIR FINDS SUBSTANCE TO CURB BLOOD VESSELS,” and “MODERN CONCERNS ENRICH PASSOVER RITUALS”: what one might call a flu of writing.

One morning, I switched on the TV and jumped from “Good Morning America” to “The CBS Morning News” and on to “Today,” skipping commercials and catching a two-hour parade of correspondents and experts and the slow drip-drip-drip of the news about scandal, disaster, and defeat, plus a few pale-faced authors flacking their books; and ninety seconds after each eager face faded from the screen I couldn’t remember one thing that had been said, except that Esther Williams, promoting her line of women’s swimwear, referred to the rear end as “buns,” and a Ford vice-president, talking about the silver anniversary of the Mustang while standing next to a red one, said it had “filled a niche in the market.” My buns had filled a niche in the bed for ten days, and I wished somebody would come on TV and say, “Believe me, this is not forever, things will get better. ” Someone radiant but real, like Meryl Streep, who suffers so splendidly in her movies.

I owned a red Mustang back around 1967—a gallant little machine—but I don’t own a car anymore. Too complicated. Like smoking. Enough was enough. A car in Manhattan is a ticket to misery. Nevertheless, car lover that I am, I would have kept mine, and kept complaining, were it not for a good thief who swiped it from a parking ramp one night, stripped it, and dumped it on the FDR Drive. The insurance company paid the book value, and I put the twelve thousand dollars in the bank. The car went to the boneyard. That was last July. I haven’t thought much about cars since, or about smoking since I stubbed out my last cigarette around midnight on a Saturday years ago: the following day was St. Valentine’s Day, the day my friend Butch Thompson and I had decided we would Quit. That there was my last smoke, I thought, and went up to bed sensing history in the making. I attended four movies the next day and ate a tub of popcorn, and spent most of Monday in the public library’s reading room, not smoking, and gradually the habit passed.

Every life requires a bold move now and then to revive the interest of the liver. The way to get this done is to do it. You wake up in your warm cocoon in the woods in the Adirondacks and unzip it and drop your drawers, dash out on the chilly dock, plunge into the cold, cold lake. This is good for you. That cheerful, Scoutmasterly thought convinced me I was recovering, and I went and took a hot shower and got dressed and put on a white shirt and pair of jeans. I felt better out of bed, washed, with the moss scraped off, though I was unsure what day it was: there had been no word from the outside for a long while. Nobody had faxed or expressed me a thing, and the Southern lady voice of the office answering machine said, “You have no new messages.” The thought that downtown they are getting along pretty well without you is a desolate thought; you think, It can’t keep going on like this. And it doesn’t. The urge toward life is expressed by pulling on your pants, and the way to do it is to stand up and do it.