Note from a Previous Denizen

99 I do remember that chronicles of plague aren’t easy reading. Still, healthy people shove them down despite a popping gag reflex. Afterward, these tales induce a reflux of pity, fear, discouragement with the future. But with my little plague story, just this once—since I’m a third-stager, dying from it, and I promise you it’s not a big deal—just this once let’s sidestep all the terror and despair, and see if we can’t arrive somewhere more entertaining. No pity, no fear! I’m out to win your chuckle of fellow feeling, future friend. Otherwise, what a cruel waste of my time if you should read these notes and end by nervously pitying us. I get enough of that from the returnees. They’re braving their way back from exile now, and they do so bore me. They should be ashamed: mournful, God-help-us-all pity splattering their faces, hunched up in the rocks, afraid I might sneeze upwind of them. Nevertheless, I must try to be like you, for a moment, or you won’t listen. I must remember the beginning and admit to you that, yes, the early events of the disease are gruesome—pity fodder, definitely nothing to laugh at. I do not feel the slightest urge to laugh as I jot down, in no particular order, these pity-itching reminiscences: blisters, hemorrhage, ice bath, fever, vomiting, restraints, bleeding, terror, seizures, screaming, anguish, thirst for death, anxiety, sobbing, gasping, pus, rupture, fracture , lungs collapsing, torments, diarrhea, sores. Well, frankly, yes, now I am laughing. As with all of us fortunate ones—those who have ridden the disease’s rapids all the way to the end—the calibrations of laughter have been revealed to me down to a FICTION Note from a Previous Denizen ArThur phIllIps 100 Ecotone: reimagining place very fine granularity. I would merely be clinging to vestigial notions of propriety, and only to impress you, if I priggishly muttered that this list of symptoms did not have anything amusing around its edges. laugh a little with me. No? I understand if you don’t see the funny part yet. We didn’t either at first, but it comes. It will come to you. You’ll warm up as it gets closer. Yes, yes, one did feel pity at first! I remember! I do! When one was healthy and one was presented with suffering, then one felt pity. I remember! It wasn’t any funnier to us than it might be to you . . . But later, one got the joke, as it were. And once one had experienced all that suffering oneself, and one knew that the torments of the newly infected would soon be over, one didn’t bother to squeeze out a dose of simulated pity for every new whimpering bleeder. It was not that one was “hardened” or “inured” or other congealed clichés like that. It was simply that by then a certain amount of liberating perspective had been granted one. Of course, as a third-stager, one did try not to laugh right in front of the new first-stagers. But, really, they were so scared, it was difficult to take them seriously. In the very beginning, when by definition there were only firststagers , and the future seemed to promise only horrific suffering ad infinitum, naturally pity bubbled and fear’s blue electricity crackled everywhere across our pretty island. pity for the victims. pity for the victims’ terrified families. Pity for the stuttering doctors struggling to find cures or causes or at least some way to provide comfort, even as they feared they were contracting the mysteriously transmitted disease themselves. Fear of catching it. Fear of a loved one catching it. Fear that something essential was breaking down. Fear that this errant horseman might invite his colleagues to join him. Would people shrivel into creatures ever more violent, selfish, mistrustful? Would society collapse? Would brother turn against brother? These notions now seem drolly paranoid. When, in those early weeks, the plague had no explanation and the numbers of the sick continually swelled, straining our small island hospital, and doctors and nurses were falling sick...