Writing
Bird Flu
1.
The End Times began with the first metropolis. After all, a few thousand years of human organization is seconds in cosmic measure. As soon as these humans massed themselves in a walled city with vegetable markets, bakeries, and paid entertainment, the count down began. Soon they would be defying the laws of gravity and attempting to reach the end of infinity. There they would settle right into the lap of some God's judgment. They wanted to look into the eyes of God, so they built a car to get them there that became their death chamber. These poor creatures were not frightened by these devices, but got over their initial nausea, and embraced addiction.
Now a virus was bearing down on their corporeal state; on the one thing they were yet to deny nature... their bodies. In the record keeping that distinguished them from other animals they had come to recognize patterns and so they noticed that other animals were dying of something that might eventually kill them: a virus, indeed a kind of an animal that distilled and expanded all life forms, something so small yet big enough to remake the planet.
The birds were just following their normal patterns, moving with the seasons. They didn't question their existence or even ask questions in English, but they were sad at the moment that their companions died. Only for a moment, as their memories were short and their instincts strong. The virus was like a psychotropic drug for them, one that interrupted their instinctive patterns so that they saw and smelled different things. (The human use of a plant's extract to excite their senses is a perversion of a plant's need to protect itself by excreting a poison). So the birds didn't choose to take a poison but were dosed with a virus, so they hallucinated before their cute frames tipped over in the marshes, or fell off a branch. Some didn't build up their immunities and overdosed on the virus.
The humans were initially moved by instinct, an unspoken directive to get out of the rain, as it were. But once they had invented the umbrella, an over bearing economy saw the manufacture and distribution of things that were only held in common by desire, another natural phenomenon that had distinctly mutated in their self-conscious brains. On the one hand they were more comfortable, more protected than any other animal, but on the other hand, this comfort, or degree of comfort, became exclusive in their economy. Birds were not allowed to fly around inside the house, but were caged in a designated and controllable spot.
Our relatives had experienced these things before. Their memories of a great war were not just of brothers against brothers, or the cruel and destructive inventions of madmen, but of a virus taking advantage of tired humans fed on tinned meats and brandy dregs. The Generals were driven mad by the arbitrary and indifferent mode of this extra-human influence. Their religious advisors, busy with the justification for philosophically sanctioned murder, were at a loss as to which nation the virus sided with. The troops only cursed the command, viewing the deadly flu as something merciful, one of the blackest jokes of the war, sending you into delirious giggles before your lungs filled with essential fluid.
So now the news media was alerted. The ever-accelerated technological advancements of the media networks were constantly demanding information, while simultaneously dumbing things down and spicing them up. Slowly, with their inbred short attention spans, they began to turn to their ready made, hard and fast sources: the so-called experts. It was not until discarded bits of language were spoken by recognizable celebrities that the ever-distracted television producers made the virus a lead story. And then it was like the virus had a reflected clone - a media virus – so that the spectator watching the reportage began to feel their foreheads in an effort to detect fever.
Many years ago there was a story about the birds waging war against us. It was a work of art that was not to be taken literally, but was layered like all interesting stories, subject to multiple interpretations. And it was entertaining, simply entertaining, so you didn't have to wonder what the story meant. You could sit back and be distracted for a couple of hours, filtering your anxieties through the spectacle of light and sound.
There are two uses for the metaphorical narrative: to inspire critical thought, or to forget everything. Art is ambiguous, and no one had quite figured out its exact social use. But the everyday interpretation, in this case, a story about birds, all kinds of birds, coming together and attacking humans, was either about revenge (the birds were tired of being caged) or it was about some kind of natural imbalance. Things were turned topsy-turvy. Anything could wipe us off the planet if they simply came together, multiplying their little strengths into one overpowering mass.
It's the humans who try to make a wicked route around reality. They, in their fantastic diversion from biology, wanted to set up a resort in the midst of e-coli, "Because it's so beautiful", the shapes and colors attracting them more than the consequences. If they could set up a few comfortable chairs, and a full bar, and watch the end of all things, they would. But the paradox was their desire to get up after the show was over, stretching their arms, yawning, and discuss what they would do next. "I'm going home because I have to get up early tomorrow".
2.
People were advised to stay home. Bureaucratic advice, like storing bottles of water, became handy instead of painfully obvious. Those paranoids, who had already stockpiled supplies, were welcomed into the black market.
Then the days when they would hardly get out of bed started. B began to exhibit the qualities of a once powerful man who had lost control. He told F that they must build a life raft. They brought what was left of their meager supplies into the bedroom, and nailed the door shut.
You can imagine what happened in the cities.
They were never sure if their odd symptoms, the aches and pains, the occasional headaches, were the cause of anxiety or the plague; if they were psychological symptoms, or if their artificial minds were being superceded and undermined by the natural symbiosis of life and death. They had followed the stated precautions exactly, but human logic was now beyond the erratic and potent force of invisible microbes.
The plants and insects were thriving; otherwise, an unsettled silence became their soundtrack. B knew he had a potential best seller on hand, but by the time he had done the one hundredth inventory of the room's contents, he had no time to write.
He was muttering "best seller . . ." under his breath when his wife said, "What?"
The air in the room was utterly stuffy. They dozed off and on during the daylight and slept in the dark. There was no electricity.
Who went first we cannot be sure off, or who infected whom. They had been so careful, had cut off all contact, even pushing their pets out into the cold. B began to think of the possibilities of cat meat, of making a barbecue in the bathroom sink. He would cut a hole in the ceiling. Occasionally he would imagine putting a hammer through the forehead of F.
For brief moments of transcendent masochism F's bedsores became luscious and inviting holes. Hundreds of possible pairings between dissimilar animals and consensual relatives, impulses that were only vaguely implied in the actual encounter, became proudly distinct in her roving mind. Then, a wave would crash over the edge of their life raft, and she would come to the surface and see the shallow-breathing, thin, and supine body of B as himself, and another entirely different person, or people.
Once her seasickness had subsided she would do all of them.
Suddenly the TV burst through its static and lurched off and on in the same erratic and hallucinatory manner of their current days, and through this ether came not significant information but the loud and canned cries of the familiar advertisement. And then the signal dropped off again. B sat with the remote in his hand propped against the headboard. He continued staring at the dormant screen.
It was that summer long ago when he first noticed his loins but still had no pimples. In a kind of quiet way he became conscious of his skin and the way it felt when passing through shade or under the full force of sun. On the blank screen of the bedroom's fifty-inch flat screen television he saw a mini-series version of his younger self, strolling a path of stamped earth winding among dried weeds. Up ahead, leaning over lapping water and absorbed in a bright idle, was another whose freshness matched his own.
The intermittent bursts of electricity, tantalizing and frustrating, were like the cracks of a whip making their bodies writhe involuntarily. With each quick flicker of the TV, the alarm clock, the light bulb, one of them would sit up quickly and respond by coughing after the dead silence and dusk had returned. Each relieving fantasy was wedged between hours of dried sweat and subtle nausea.
F's nostril registered the acrid smell of unwashed bodies as she scratched at one of the nails that fastened the door shut. Suddenly she found herself on the edge of the bed picking a scab that she wasn't sure was on her leg or B's prick. He was either saying, "Stop" or "Go". For no reason she thought she might have looked under the bed to see if her info-mercial exercise apparatus was still collecting dust.
Maybe it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding. Better yet, maybe it was a dream, a feverous dream, the kind of dream that endlessly loops incomprehensible phrases that nevertheless make sense in a certain context. The record skipped but you learned the phrase well. Perhaps it was a case of mass hysteria, a conspiracy at the highest level. Soon fresh air would replace disinfectant; normal everyday accidents would replace the rank germ. History was full of stories of the privileged, those who had little to worry about, fleeing phantoms.
B and F were traveling nowhere fast. They were on an interminable and deadly boring journey. They had built up all the accepted and proven hedges against insecurity but the natural and cosmic elements had forced them to accept a random cast of the die. They had put their faith in the known, which was fast becoming obsolete.
B refused to use the thermometer, but it was always on his mind. He knew where it lurked, in a bag in a cupboard in the bathroom, a talisman of definite information. But did he want to accept scientific proof of his imminent demise? He had his own methods, his own rituals to gauge his fitness. All the rest of his routines had broken down. Every book, page, brochure and tag in the room had been read and reread. All that was left was his own story, in which he self consciously decided what to include or delete, and his diabolical imagination, which needed to be accessed in order to jump start his style, but which threatened to unhinge his organizing principals.
If he could get a hard-on, he was still a healthy male.
After they had drifted away and there was no longer a B or a F, when all traces of them and the details stated here had been so thoroughly obliterated that next people thought they were starting from scratch, it was then that the planet exploded. This was no crapshoot, when people like B and F had a fighting chance to at least have a story to tell their grandchildren. This was the kind of cataclysm that is only beautiful from hundreds of light years away. Finally all earthly life was returned to the void and the various dust compounds that inhabit it.