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Michael McLeod
Dave:
There's no good reason for the average citizen to possess the kind of weapons they handed out to us when we were soldiers.
In other news: a beautiful beginning to a recent contextual story inspired by the pandemic:
Last winter, when the gloom first fell, I saw an old woman, her back bent like a shepherd’s crook, walking watchfully through the freezing rain. She navigated the slush as she crossed the road, in black boots that she’d lined with plastic bags against the wet and the cold. She wore a mask the color of flesh, unnaturally smooth, but this was before everyone was wearing masks, and, at first, I couldn’t tell what it was: she looked as though she had no nose and no mouth. Closer, I could see the thing for itself, made—she must have stitched it herself—out of an old beige underwire bra, one cup cut off and turned upside down, the wire crimped onto the bridge of her nose, the thin nylon straps cinched around the back of her head. I stepped toward her, thinking I ought to say something: was she O.K.? Instantly her eyes widened and she turned away, quickening her pace. I never saw her again.
Not long after that, I started writing an essay about the literature of contagion, stories about plagues. Days, I read books. Nights, I sewed masks out of scraps of fabric and rubber bands, with paper towels for batting, folded inside like panty liners. I wondered about how plague stories begin, and what happens next. “All the world is topsy-turvy,” a character in one story says. “And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” Humans lose their humanity, according to the usual plot. As the pestilence spreads, people grow fearful of one another; families closet themselves in their houses. Stores take in their wares; schoolhouses bolt their doors. The rich flee; the poor sicken. The hospitals fill. The arts wither. Society descends into chaos, government into anarchy. Finally, in the last stage of this seemingly inevitable regression, in which history runs in reverse, books and even the alphabet are forgotten, knowledge is lost, and humans are reduced to brutes. In Octavia Butler’s 1984 novel, “Clay’s Ark,” set in the year 2021, the mutant survivors of an alien pathogen from Proxima Centauri 2 are “no longer human.” Lately, waiting for a shot of a vaccine, I’m hoping for another ending. Do the humans get to be human again?
Every plague leaves its mark on the world: crosses in our graveyards, blots of ink on our imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had witnessed the ravages of cholera in Philadelphia, and he likely knew the story of how, in Paris, in 1832, the disease had struck at a ball, where guests turned violet blue beneath their masks. In Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” from 1842, Prince Prospero (“happy and dauntless and sagacious”) has fled a pestilence—a plague that stains its victims’ faces crimson—to live in grotesque luxury with a thousand of his noblemen and women in a secluded abbey, behind walls gated with iron. At a lavish masquerade ball, a tall, gaunt guest arrives to ruin their careless fun. He is dressed as a dead man: “The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat.” He is dressed as the Red Death itself: “His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.” Everyone dies, and because this is Poe, they die as an ebony clock tolls midnight (after which, even the clock dies): “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
More often, a remnant of life survives—a reminder of just how much has been lost. In Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague,” published not long before the 1918 flu pandemic, a contagion kills nearly everyone on the planet; the story is set in 2073, sixty years after the imagined outbreak, when a handful survive, unlettered, “skin-clad and barbaric.” One very, very old man who, a half century before, had been an English professor at Berkeley predicts good news: “We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb toward civilization.” Still, he isn’t terrifically optimistic, noting, “It will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived! But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything.” For this reason, he has built a sort of ark—a library—hidden in a cave. “I have stored many books,” he tells his illiterate grandsons. “In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print. Some day men will read again.”
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