New Deaths

As I sterilised the counters and floor of the flat a woman was talking on the radio about physics. She was some celebrated astrophysicist and though she studied the very big she was saying something about the very small, that is, quantum mechanics, ‘nothing is as it seems; what you see is very different to what I see, objective reality is an illusion. We know it is that way but we don’t know why.’ She sounded apologetic at that full stop so the interviewer asked what we do know. ‘Newtonian physics,’ she said. ‘Let’s us predict the future – if we’re given enough information about the present.’ From this she segued back to astrophysics. But not some new theory, or line of research or piece of engineering, instead she quoted some bleak lines from Lord Byron

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread.

She related this to the end of the Universe, which she said was expanding until one day it’d end. In fact they’d calculated that day, she said, ‘to a high degree of precision.’ Though it was a way off yet, this calculation seemed to have imbued a sense of finality among astrophysicists.

‘It will just end…’ she said.

The presenter filled the silence by telling a joke – the one about the physicist Heisenberg being pulled over by the police who asked if he knew his speed. ‘No,’ Heisenberg replied, ‘but I know my position.’ The two laughed, at least the presenter did, and I turned off the radio before the news could start.

I scrubbed my hands and pulled on my jacket. I’d made a list of ingredients and stuffed it into my pocket. I made sure to pick up my paper and mask and left the flat. I thought it funny, vaguely recalling a physics textbook, that there was still a great mystery in the hard sciences, and how similar it sounded to what I knew about eastern religion.

Outside the streets were empty but for a few groups of black coats. The air was raw and carried a smell of mustard. A happy coincidence, since all traffic had been banned, was a slight lifting in pollution. I pulled my mask taut around my mouth and nose. It’d been strange for a while, wandering the empty streets, but it’d become the norm. There were people still but they were edgy, and stayed indoors. My mask provided an anonymity which I liked, though not enough – my paper laid bare everything about me and living alone these days aroused suspicion.

Up ahead, next to a barrier in the road, a group of black coats mingled under a cloud of smoke. One squatted on the asphalt and another was wind-milling his arms like he was readying himself for a swim. Another peeled off from the group and lolled towards the pavement. The red band tied fast on his arm gave him his authority and I could see our paths would meet. The black coats were not thugs, they were local officials who chain smoked and checked papers. The thuggish ones who took bribes, and were said to have been responsible for the sudden spread of the thing, had been smoked out in a well-publicised purge. Those who remained were paragons of honesty.

The mask which gave me anonymity gave everyone else anonymity too and though I couldn’t tell if he was staring at me, the black coat’s body language made it clear he was going to intercept me. I kept my head down and felt completely relaxed. I’d been asked for my paper the last time I’d come out – three days ago – and everything had been in order. The paper was official and showed I lived alone and was therefore entitled to go out to the supermarket for essentials.

Just after we were first told it was serious, households had to designate a runner. The rest were to stay inside. Cracks in this imposed cabin fever had soon appeared; there was a daily ritual whereby people sang out from their opened windows at the same time every evening, filling the empty city streets with echoing song. This had been reported as a sign of courage. But as the chants and songs became more erratic they had stopped being reported. Recently, penalties had been imposed for ‘Public Singing’ and examples made of violators. For the most part people had not adapted well to being quarantined in their homes. One grey afternoon I’d looked out of my window on the eighth floor and a body silently flew past observing, presumably, Newtonian physics. I looked over my balcony to see the disfigured body on the pavement below surrounded by a slowly flooding pool of blood. When I looked out again ten minutes later the body had gone and a figure in a hazmat suit was spraying the area.

The black coat grunted and I was forced to look up. He didn’t ask for my paper immediately, the feeling I often got from people was one of boredom. Interactions, where safe, were dragged out. Those in positions of power seemed to deliberate over its imposition, as if drawing out sex to delay an orgasm.

‘Going where?’ he asked.

All shops, except one supermarket, were closed. Restaurants had been shut and any gathering place – which included all entertainment facilities – had been ordered to shutter their doors and windows. The supermarket was my only viable destination.

He nodded when I told him. Even behind his mask I sensed the way he was licking his lips.

‘No food in?’ he enquired.

I did have some food in but had thought to get in more – in fact I’d decided to learn how to bake bread and had none of the ingredients. But I did not say this. I told him I had run out of cigarettes and peanuts. I said this to appease him; I imagined he’d go to the supermarket to buy cigarettes and peanuts. This was a mistake. I did not smoke so when he took a packet from his coat pocket and offered me one, I had to accept.

He took one for himself and lifted his mask enough to reveal a mouth to light it, his mask was a severe respiratory device from the government, like an old gas mask. Mine was a rudimentary cloth one which I dare not lift in the streets – going unmasked even for a moment carried a prison sentence. He took some deep draws on the cigarette then replaced his mask and continued watching me. I thought about returning the cigarette, but instead did what I imagined a smoker might do when he didn’t want a smoke: I stuffed it behind my ear. I made out like I needed to get going – though the supermarket was 24-hours and everyone was forbidden from working until further notice – so most people’s urge to hurry had largely ceased.

He lifted the mask for another draw and as he did so he said, ‘let me see your paper.’

I passed him the folded slip which he had to use both hands to unfold, pulling his mask down and holding the cigarette, reading the simple information carefully.

The other three black coats in the middle of the road, lacking any cars to stop, drifted over and gathered around my paper. My initial interrogator muttered something to them which I didn’t catch and the three quickly snapped their masked faces to me, then back at the paper.

‘Live alone,’ the original black coat said, ‘why live alone?’

This had been a common comment before all this started – asked in a social setting, casually but with intrigue. Now it was asked with suspicion. One of the black coats detached himself from the group and went back to the barrier to sneeze, as was the protocol, into the crook of his arm. Sneezing around other people also carried a severe penalty. In theory, living alone should have been praised – there was nobody to infect. But without family, the suspicion went, there was the immediate danger of thinking. And past evidence suggested thinking could be dangerous. I tried to make a joke about it being hard to find a partner. They did not laugh which released a shot of adrenaline. The sneezing black coat returned wiping his eyes under his mask and I wondered, like we all wondered now, whether he had it.

The paper was passed back to me, but as I took it, a peppery itch suddenly came to my nostrils and as I placed my hand on the paper, I sneezed. I felt gloopy mucus on the inside of my mask press cold against my lips and nose, but some had travelled through my thin mask and on my outstretched hand I felt droplets. A spray of translucent patches on my paper evidenced my emission. The black coat was gloved and, aside from the fact I did not have it and that my mask had contained the bulk of the sneeze, I was safe in the knowledge he would be able to wash the glove and anyway, he’d lowered his mask again, so there was minimal chance of transmission. But this was evidently not how the black coats saw it.

I was quickly face down on the paving slab with a boot resting on my back. As I lay there silent and motionless, listening to the excited chat of the black coats, light footsteps stopped next to my head. I heard the rasp of a photograph being taken. Then the rumble of an engine grew nearer and red flashes appeared. I was kicked onto my back to see three people in hazmat suits and a pistol was pressed to my forehead and a click sounded – it recorded my temperature. I was stripped naked then starpped onto a stretcher and placed in the back of the flashing ambulance. There was an echoing squeak as the tyres struggled to gain traction.

It was mildly relaxing; my shoulders were no longer tense and I lay naked, securely strapped to the stretcher. One person remained with me in a hazmat suit, a woman, I could tell from the eyes visible behind the visor. Her eyes were bloodshot and the skin around them bulbous. They flitted between me and a laptop to which I had been connected. I felt the suspicion she had for me which made me ashamed. I smiled weakly at her. My mask had been removed and left in a pile with my clothes in the street. Surely those infected had travelled in this same ambulance. Rumours had gone round that the emergency services had been so overstretched and unprepared by the scale of the thing that their hygiene procedures had become lax.

I imagined the black coats rubbing their hands around my burning clothes in the middle of the road, perhaps using my paper to get the fire going. Perhaps too using the other paper in my jacket pocket with the list of ingredients for bread. When I realised I still had the cigarette behind my ear I took it, out of curiosity, and placed it between my lips. This attracted the eyes of my companion and she seemed unsure whether this was something to be encouraged or punished. There was nobody to ask and though she had a radio she would need to lift her hood to use it which I knew she would not do.

When the vehicle stopped and the back doors were opened she bounded out to the two who’d been in the front, jabbing a finger towards me. One of them shrugged and reached inside a pocket. A lit match appeared in front of me.

I was wheeled through giant doors, coughing at the acrid taste of the tarry smoke, and a ringing chaos entered my ears. All around people were naked or sheeted and buckled down on stretchers parked at jaunty angles. A few officials in hazmat suits weaved between stretchers, tagging people’s flesh with marker pens while others in civilian jackets and masks gripped the rail of individual stretchers.

Banners hung limp on the walls saying we must fight it, that it would be defeated by April, we must be willing to sacrifice, we must unite and be strong. I took a deep draw on the cigarette and wondered, as my transporters clanked my stretcher into a dark corner next to the soft wheezes of another man, how the bread would have come out.