The Disease Everyone Loves To Hate

He was feverish. The streets were empty. The whole world, an empty pillbox. The man took precedence. He was sick before the lot of you. This is how this story begins. You might think I´m employing an angry tone or just being informative, but he was a friend of mine. He killed himself for an abundance of reasons. As one does. Until they all became numb. As if suffering from hunger. Starvation.

A man who loses all hope of ever having anything to eat. But he can still see his caved-in stomach. He can´t forget to stop caring. If his condition is chronic, then there is no reason to worry. He learned a lot about anxiety in the past years. He felt it coming. Anxiety works by boomerang effect, the more you try to fling it away, the harder it hits, dead in the stomach.

This man, this once happy, passionate person, now took an objective view of his personal illness. More like an irritable elementary school teacher, than a proper scientist. A long list of reasons, he could call out by name. Better to ignore. He had a nagging feeling that he had to walk it out. Closed-circuit voltage in the nerves of his legs. But he knew it was highly contagious. So he waited until very late at night, pre-dawn, when the bars were closing.

He liked to see the waiters stacking up the chairs, the secluded tables where a particular touch could leave a girl naked. Or, even, the empty stools where men sat all night mustering up courage. They looked wet with sweat, contaminated somehow. The couples who hooked up where now far from view.

He liked the look of empty places. I forgot to tell you, he was a bit ahead of his time.

The downside of empty streets are the locked hinged storm doors that go with them. When everything is deserted. He hated it out there, but it was now his natural habitat. And he had to walk all that feverish tingling off.

Home is deserted as well. Comorbid with his disease is the necessity of living alone. His whole apartment is contaminated. With rambling walking. With ruminating thoughts. Thoughts gone out of control. There is hardly something to look at that wasn´t soiled by one of those thoughts. These ideas would sweat off his body (he knew the symptoms well) and stick forever on sofa cushions, on his bed, especially. On the color paintings of young children quickly evacuated. The other end of the dinner table has to be emptied out as well. The town looks like a building where all its residents are being evicted. For what? Not paying rent? Not paying attention?

He didn´t have it in him to wipe the sweat-stains. The pieces of a man´s decay he hoards as if they were mementos. Even decay in a dead home can be held up high like a trophy. It´s a triumph merely to be alive.

At dawn, by clockwork, his thoughts would go out of control. Better let them flee. They´ll come back, he´ll tell himself, they´ll come back, every dawn, he´d try to convince himself as he saw out closed windows another morning discoloring the sky.

His empty deserted home life bled into the empty, deserted streets. His big secret was that he was the first host, the first infectious agent. He needed to be the first to die. Yet he lacked the will for it. Yet he did it.

Comorbid with fever were those blemishes, those ugly spots in his face anyone could see. First, they stared out of amusement, laughed out loud, with him or at him, he didn´t really care, as of yet.

In a matter of months, they became insecure, then, in a matter of weeks, enraged. Word spread. People were scared for their lives. He took the appropriate measures. He went to the doctor, took his pills, and kept well away.

It is his fault. He knows it is. The curfew. The empty apartment spreading into the abandoned regions of the city he explores at night. Like a scientist, to keep his feelings in tight.

He goes through every symptom before he does himself in. I wish I could say I´m around to know for sure, but being his life-long friend, I know he kills himself out of disgust at all of us. Not in anyway out of love. We are all as ugly as he is, by then.

It drives him crazy, that´s what it does. The curfew. It starts affecting his personality. At first, they will just brush him off, they will even pander him occasionally. Indifference and pandering came in and out of style.

Then, things get sicker. The city is ailing. The president takes a stand. Nobody was really taking this very seriously, but it is a real pandemic. The more one thinks about it, the more one sees invisible smudges in their own faces, pale lips, the staring eyes of the hungry. All the typical symptoms. They read the fine print of a pillbox, before all the medicine goes. They check into and admit themselves in the hospital. They need ventilators, just to feel like somebody cares. But they are goners.

I was one of the first to flee. I was the one closest to him and I knew how this thing was contagious. People would look at me differently. I didn´t know if I was imagining things. People would stop inviting me to parties. At work, people seemed to ignore me. I got the picture. I stayed home. No one really comes out and says anything in the beginning. They just notice the change and they just exempt you from their lives. I missed my high school reunion, I missed dates, I missed going out with friends, I ended a long relationship with my girlfriend. I stayed home. And this was even before I could see street after street deserted. This was before they put me in quarantine.

I knew the signs. Because it happened to my best friend. After the fake indifference and the gossip behind his back, he started calling people up, hearing a change in their voices, an uneasiness, forced laughter at jokes he didn´t feel like making in the first place. The more they avoided him, the more he called.

They´d make the usual excuses, they´d say they were busy. Then, they´d blurt out they had lives to live. And it made sense because it was true. Years passed and here I was unable to find a date, losing friends, who just, simply, moved on.

I picked up the phone. Maybe if I could just keep my distance…But still, better safe than sorry.

They´d talk then hang up. They´d answer and hang up. They´d leave me hanging in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of an explanation, I would try to justify anything, just about anything and they just hung up. As if following orders. Like a pack of sheep.

I call, they answer, they hang up. That´s the drill. I never knew why they just didn´t just forgo answering the damn phone. Politeness is the last to go.

So is self-love. Not to say selfishness. I couldn´t really blame them. I started going out too late, seeing the waiters close up, wanting to develop a sixth sense so I could still sense the talk that lingered, and then left town. I started roaming my empty apartment and seeing empty streets. First, I thought I was hallucinating, but it wasn´t part of any known symptom. I just heard idle talk and saw empty deserted restaurants and bars.

My hometown turned into the surface of the moon. As if, by lightning, we all knew we were infected and meant to die.

The pills they gave me were meant to kill the virus. But I knew there was no cure. Once you start hallucinating, there´s no cure for you left. Everyone knew they had it. This thing is highly contagious once you it enters your conscience. It´s deadly, like a still-life portrait of the family you once had. It´s called loneliness. But once you catch it, you´d call it anything imaginable.