Quarantine

We had passed the three month mark and E. Coli was pronounced dead. There were the usual celebrations and stories. People posted about the time they got sick with it, how miserable it was. A remembrance was held for all of those it had killed throughout history (mostly just the elderly and infants, as usual).

The jubilation was becoming muted. We’d killed off so many viruses and bacteria at this point that seeing another dead just didn’t carry the same thrill. The norovirus and MRSA had died within a month. Influenza lasted a full day, parainfluenza ten hours. Staph and RSV gasped to death over a matter of hours.

The demise of the common cold had made for the biggest celebration, of course. That tenacious little shit died for good on day seven of the quarantine, and we all threw the biggest party we could. I think it was mostly about our race overcoming something we’ve always just had to deal with. The triumph of humankind over an ancient foe, some shit like that. I imagine the surviving mammals felt much the same when the dinosaurs went extinct: fuck you, cold virus. Eat shit. It was a good time.

I read a few reactions about E. Coli’s demise in the CDC’s comment section and clicked off my phone, then stood and stretched my legs. The mall had been as good a place to sit for a while as any. I yelled “hello” as loudly as I could and listened. It came back to me, but faintly. You’d think malls would have a decent echo, but really, they just suck up sound. Maybe the storefronts act like baffles for soundwaves. Maybe they were designed to muffle acoustics, make them feel less cacophonous and unwelcoming. I dunno. At any rate, they’re low on my list of best places to find an echo.

All around me, the mall was silent and empty as was the world outside. I was the only person on Earth. Or, rather, I was the only person on this Earth.

Three years ago some egghead invented some weird technology that made ‘sidestepping’ to identical realities possible. It’s called QDRF. I know that the first word is quantum but after that I lose interest. The jist is that you can ‘unfold’ different realities from ours with a number of variables. One of those variables was population density, and that one turned out to be the magic key. You could now do whatever you wanted within the ecology without having to worry about the impact on any humans or wildlife. With limitless unpopulated Earths to mine, pollute and abandon, wealth became near-limitless within a year and things started accelerating really quickly.

So then some other egghead had the idea that we could displace everyone into their own abandoned reality for a span of six months. In that time all the bacterial and viral boogins would die off without hosts to jump between. Then we all come back and a pretty solid array of communicable diseases would be completely wiped off the face of the planet. Countless lives (elderly and infant) and productive hours would be saved. The CDC and the government called it The Mass Quarantine Protocol. The rest of us called it The Grounding. Everyone go to your rooms. The cost was phenomenal, but what’s money when resource scarcity is a thing of the past?

Families with kids under 18, people with pets and married couples were allowed to stay together in their realities. Me, I was single, so here I was. I didn’t mind it. It was nice. You got to explore the world over the course of half a year. Nothing you did in this reality would carry over to our shared one, so you could do pretty much anything. No consequences. Just don’t hurt yourself. You’re given the locations of strategically placed crates of medical supplies and some first aid training. After that you’re on your own. Food was everywhere… just stick to the nonperishables.

We still had interreality social media, which was nice. It felt less lonely. “We’re all alone in this together” was a popular idiom. People posted photos of the places they visited. Lots of famous places and landmarks. The photos of an empty Times Square were eerie. A few people posted videos of themselves smashing things, blowing up airplanes, burning museums. Lots of vandalism at Disney World, lots of dicks drawn on classic paintings. I’d broken a few windows early on, myself, but the thrill wore off.

My ex would sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a world with no consequences. He asked once what I’d do if I could do anything, and I shrugged. “I dunno Jonathan,” I said. “Get you to stop asking dumb questions, I guess.” He laughed and started talking about what he’d do. I tuned him out and now I can’t remember what his answer was.

I walked out of the mall and got into my RV. I’d driven a Porsche in the first few weeks, but found that once you got over the feeling of driving an expensive car, you mostly just wanted something with a bed and a bathroom. You couldn’t always rely on rest stops and motels you found off the highway. Plus you found a lot of things you wanted to take with you. I had found a taxidermy armadillo somewhere in Louisiana and had mounted it on the right side of the dash.

The RV roared to life and I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway. I was heading north along the California coast and feeling fine. I tapped my fingers on the wheel to the road music playlist I’d put together. I considered asking the armadillo what he wanted to do today, then decided I wasn’t lonely enough to talk to stuffed animals. Not yet. I laughed.

The loneliness did pull at you, though. Mostly at night. I’d spent a couple of nights in the desert a couple of months back. There was nothing to be scared of out there, the only animals allowed in The Grounding’s version of Earth were squirrels, birds, chipmunks and other harmless critters. There were no bears, no snakes, no mountain lions, no parasites or poisonous insects or sharks or spiders or jellyfish in the whole world.

Still, though, the desert was scary. The first night out there I lit a campfire and sat around it with a case of beer. The darkness of an empty world is a terrible thing. It whispers to you. It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re left alone in the house for the first time, and you panic and lock the doors. At least then you could tell yourself you’re scared of intruders. Here, I didn’t know what I was afraid of. I just kept looking over the fire and into the black that I knew held no one. I thought about how having someone to talk to would make everything better. Even Jonathan, with his lame jokes and the stories he kept telling over and over. I began thinking about how there was no one out there and looked up. The stars wheeled overhead, as bright as a painting. No one out there either.

There’s a feeling when you start thinking that, about how you’re the only human anywhere in space. That was only technically true of course, and there were ten billion people in separate realities just waiting to be reunited after the C. Difficile virus (the last name on the hit list) died.

I wished I wasn’t alone. I wished I hadn’t broken up with Jonathan when he got his diagnosis. I wished I’d been strong enough to tough it out. I wished he’d proposed, or I had. This wishing happened a lot at night. At night the emptiness had a pulse.

The days were fun, though. During the day you wandered around and explored and discovered things and made your own way.

Some people were on a quest to find the recipe to Coca Cola. They shared updates and theories as they combed through Coke headquarters in Atlanta. Coke, of course, had seen this coming. Through the entire six month span of The Grounding the only real thing at risk was information, so companies and celebrities with secrets to keep had taken a great number of precautionary measures before The Grounding took effect.

Some people were using this time to create, or to hone a skill. Lots of novels were being written, a good amount of landscape paintings, tons of photography and far too much poetry. Lots of vapid insights into isolation and the human condition.

Mostly I just wandered around. Road tripped. The roads were clear and the cars were all gassed up with keys in the ignition. I’d driven down the coast and across the bridge connecting the keys. I’d spent a week or two down at Key West, soaking up as much of the white sand beaches as I could. When I got bored I headed back up and west across Alabama and Mississippi. I’d ambled through the southwest. I’d spent a lot of time roaming around San Francisco and Los Angeles. I’d swum in the pacific.

A post went viral around that time. It claimed that if you visited a gothic manor in Seattle and started hunting around, you could find evidence of a real murder and a number of clues. I didn’t read ahead because I wanted to try it without spoilers when I got to Seattle. Someone had written up a walkthrough, I figured I’d use that if I couldn’t figure it out on my own. I’d be in Seattle in a few days. I bet a manor would have a nice echo.

I could amble around the states for a few months, so long as I was in the northeast by the time autumn rolled around. Almost everyone that was traveling was planning to hit Vermont for the high foliage season. The photography was expected to be spectacular.

The road hummed under my tires and the sun was beginning to lean just a bit over to the western side of the sky as the afternoon crawled along.

I stopped at a gas station and grabbed an armload of snacks. I eyed a fast food joint across the road and my belly grumbled. You really began to miss prepared food. You could have whatever you wanted, you could make whatever you wanted, but sometimes the urge to just grab some chinese or a burger was overwhelming. I missed french fries. I missed lasagna. When the reunification happened and we all got home I was going to grab takeout from my three favorite places all at once. I don’t know how to cook and for the fiftieth time I wish I’d learned before all this started. Jonathan had offered to teach me, once, and I laughed and asked what the point of that was when I had him to cook for me.

My phone buzzed as I was walking back to the RV. It buzzed again as I was taking it out, and again as I opened my phone. The government had posted a video from the chairman of the CDC. He looked drawn and waxy. I went and sat at a picnic table nearby and clicked play on the video.

The chairman stammered through a minute or two of pleasantries and technical jargon before he got to the point- There was a problem with the QRDF. It wasn’t working. There had been a problem in the final code for the sequence. For right now, at least, we couldn’t be called back for the reunification. We were all effectively marooned. The man responsible for triple-checking that code wasn’t responding to his phone. I couldn’t blame him, if you had fucked up that badly, wouldn’t you just disappear too? The engineers would keep trying. There were a number of stopgaps in place to prevent this sort of thing, the chairman insisted, but somehow here we were.

Aside from numb, I didn’t really feel anything. I read some comments. People were, understandably, freaking out. Someone suggested this was how the Earth quarantined itself from us. Others started latching onto that idea, clicking like, sharing. Someone else joked that this way at least we’d get rid of Syphilis and AIDS in the bargain. Everyone was losing their shit. The internet was the text version of a Bosch painting.

I put the phone down and looked around. There was a gorgeous mountain in view over the trees. I was at a little rest stop in northern California and the sun was setting again. I gulped in a breath and bellowed “hellooo” as loudly as I could. No echo came back.

At the idea of spending another night without anyone to talk to, I swallowed hard. This is what happens to people that dump their boyfriends when they get cancer. This is what happens when you throw away a good man because you feel discomforted. I don’t believe in karma but when the night loneliness comes on any excuse to scourge myself makes perfect sense.

I picked up my snacks and stood, then sat down again. I took my phone back out. I hit the search bar and found Jonathan. He looked happy, but then profile pictures could be misleading, right? Mine was. I knew he’d survived but I didn’t know how healthy he’d look. How strong.

I typed, erased, typed again, erased again. What I was trying to say was mostly hi, I’m sorry but how do you hi, you’re sorry someone that loved you and that you dumped when sickness made them inconvenient? I’d spent a lot of lonely nights in The Grounding composing this message in my head and could never settle on a wording. We were all done for anyway, it probably doesn’t matter. It’s a slow race for extinction now.

“Fuck.” I put the phone away, walked to the RV and got in. “FUCK.” I took the phone back out, typed.

Hi. I’m sorry.

I hit send before I could second guess myself again and started driving. The sun cast long shadows across the highway.

I thought about how across all The Grounding’s realities, mass suicides had begun. They must have. I can’t see that many people staring down this many lonely nights for the rest of their lives. I can’t see living the rest of one’s life only talking to people online. I miss kissing. I miss hand holding, hugs, sex, having someone cook for me, having someone to talk to at night, having someone touch my hair as I fall asleep.

I knew that when I stopped driving again I may have a response from Jonathan. Either there would be an echo or there wouldn’t. Either was terrifying. “Fucking stupid,” I muttered to myself. “Fucking stupid, fucking stupid, fucking stupid.”

The armadillo didn’t have any thoughts on the topic.