I sit alone and watch news of the pandemic. It has little to do with fear, I tell myself, more a sort of morbid curiosity. The media blackout caused by the cordon sanitaire in Oregon is now almost total. What little there is to be seen is reported out of Washington, Nevada and Idaho, where new outbreaks are reported daily. It’s only a matter of time, they say, before California sees its first victim.
Despite its virulence little is known about the disease. They say that it attacks the brain and spinal column. That victims suffer encephalitis-like reactions. Lethargy, confusion and changes in personality are all common. The media report cases of grandiose delusions and memory loss. Some hear voices, others see impossible realities. All eventually disappear.
On message boards and social networks, amateur footage circulates of a Hispanic woman in the terminal stages of the disease. She sits at home, the whites of her eyes filled with blood. The skin of her forehead wrinkled and loose, the flesh beneath swollen and bulbous, as if from some horrific allergic reaction.
Her face looks as though it is spreading, pulling apart to blossom like the petals of a flower. A voice calls out to her from behind the camera and she smiles, her head lolling towards the sound, her red eyes frantic. When she reaches out her daughter takes her hand and cups it in hers. I stop watching then. She is a mother. She is someone’s child.
The disease, from what I can find online, has three distinct phases.
First, in the prodromal stage, comes the fever. The body rattles as the illness burns through it, and in the confusion the mind retreats inward, to the sanctuary of dreams.
In the second phase, the acute stage, reality begins to phase in and out. Carriers experience auditory and visual hallucinations as their dream state begins to coalesce with reality. It’s then that the blood vessels in the eyes burst and the face mushrooms outward.
The final stage, the act of disappearance, is so poorly documented that I fail to find a single accurate source of information about it online, though there are rumours. Frenzied speculation.
People post en masse to message boards.
‘Where are the bodies?’ they ask. ‘What of the dead?’
Others hypothesise endlessly over the nature of the disease and its source. They discuss portals of entry and modes of transmission. Is it like mononucleosis, the kissing disease? Something spread by acts of outward affection? They talk of the illness’s virulence. Conspiracy theorists preach about weaponised bacterial strains and false flag attacks. Others discuss zoonosis and the animals that could be helping to propagate the virus.
I follow their links and I fall down the rabbit hole of armchair expertise. I read late into the night about the chains of infection that have led to past epidemics.
Nature, I discover, is astonishingly inventive in its cruelty.
First a reservoir is discovered, a source. In the case of Guinea-worm disease this is a body of water containing tiny microscopic parasites called copepods. The infected copepods carry the Guinea- worm larvae inside of them. When a human drinks from the water supply they ingest the copepods, which promptly die in the stomach and release the infectious larvae into the body. Within ten months the larvae mature and develop into three-foot worms that are as long and wide as spaghetti noodles. When they are ready to emerge a blister forms on the skin, usually on the ball of the foot, or the flesh of the lower leg, but sometimes on the head. From there the worm writhes beneath the skin for three unbearable days before the blister bursts and the worm uncoils and hangs from the ulcer like a piece of string. When the worm comes into contact with water it releases a milky cloud containing millions of immature larvae, contaminating the new water source and further propagating the disease.
I follow link after link, watching as they turn from muted blue to purple. I open hundreds of tabs in my browser. In the dark of my office I traverse the sickly history of humanity. From the Black Death to avian influenza and Ebola. I look at pictures of swollen lymph nodes, inguinal bubo, skin lesions and acral gangrene. I see more mass graves than I thought possible. Entire cities of the dead built beneath our feet.
That night I sleep a troubled sleep.
I dream that Phineas is standing waist deep in a stream when the current sweeps his legs out from under him. He battles to keep his head above water as I stand on the bank and reach out to him. He calls my name, but as I stretch my fingers towards him a thousand worms burst from every surface of my body. When they touch his skin his body breaks down into clumps of cloudy liquid that sink down beneath the surface of the water, breaking apart and disappearing entirely in the surf. And as I cry out the worms rise up and flow down my throat, stifling my screams.