In my terror I scratched—nail into nostril—parodic to the film Poltergeist, dread reflected in the mirror—my expression muted by the dead shower’s neutralizing fog. Blood only visible on my fingers, the pennyscent was just imagined.
Anything chemic was gone; I’d been defected by our global grippe.
***
When John Milton went blind (presumably from Onan’s wrath), he conscripted his daughters to transcribe verse.
He’d scan it by mind, repeat it by ear. And he taught them all to say the phonics of the letters, but they never knew how to read.
Handily dextrous, he japed and he jacked:
His blanks dispersed a hundred punctive pairs,
the likes of which had put out Thebes’ Eyes.
***
Where did it come from? Who knows. Any action now is par hasard.
It’s even worse in this country than my home one: the plague has yoked the populace. Millions more like me, sniffing useless every day. For it’s been a long time, a long time of hiding and fearing and waiting.
And now when the whip falls, you find your back forever scorned.
***
Flattened filth of Mucus Sec, unscented. The Secant Line is a flying buttress: just a joke.
Corenivor had made a viand of my corpus, and feasted on the filigree—leaving thereby little flakes of residue and trash as calling cards withal.
Memory’s pit is Tarped—the Truthtrou lost like to time as Alice and Wendy quit their underworlds.
***
I suffered the effects of the disease for a period of four days. It was, quite literally, a roller coaster of symptoms—complete with corkscrews, false plateaux, anxious climbs, and the strange glee of coughing teenage operators asking me if I’d wanted to go again.
No, merci, I do NOT.
I step sniffsniffing like a blind man squinting: all tarred.
The illness commenced with a ballooning itch in the back of my throat. Not pain, mind you, but an irksome urtication that oft has courried dark parcels of lesser import: your Vulgar Colds, or the like. But never mind! I swilled citrus throughout the day and went off. I taught my classes from an acceptable distance. I deigned to flane on street corners, enjoying the frequent mixed winds that pass through my apartment window, and down among the fountain vapors at sidewalk’s bend.
Gnawing lingers. A moleburrow in the seams of your palates, deeper, deeper—uppercut the uvula.
By night I had developed a low-grade fever. 37.1º C. On a whim, I produced a Testing Kit from a small frondshady valise in which I hid objects medical.
What had heretofore been occupationally perfunctory, rapidly became a terror slow to dominate apperception. Y = 9: Roguish Smirk, Cartesian Rouge.
Jesus Christ, I was infitted with death.
“And is your fever ever going over 102?”
“No, Mom.”
“Are you taking the Elderberry?”
“Yes, Mom. And not.”
“Are you jaundiced, wan?”
“Impy, Sure.”
“And the Advil?”
“Only Ice.”
“Don’t play the man.”
“Nights.”
“Alright. Call us when you can.”
“Love You.”
“Love You.”
My Mom and my Dad had had it after a Christmas party, and they both ended up with nary a deformity. Impy still hasn’t had it, but Yeti already has.
At first I was relatively blessed in my reaction. Through a varied supply of medicaments, I aspergated my body with so much zinc, iron, and magnesium that I thought I was turning cyborg.
Aside from chronic melancholia and myopia (dealer’s choice what manner), I’m rather ablebodied. I’m above average height. My fat mass is >1%. In fact, had it not been for the last day, I would have quite possibly strolled around the town shirtless, celebrant, twerking on 1,000 year old walls like a millenarian deathgod as was the fashion when I was at college.
Several months before my contracting this, I fell victim to CHOLERA. Delightful, No? Certes, until you’re prostrate leaking like a broken commode. That was horrendous, and I wasn’t right for awhile after that. A fever 35º+ for at least five days. Here are a couple of notes I wrote during my bout:
OUCH.
By comparison, I was positively thrilled with how this was going. The coziness, the continuing banter in the streets, the zest of lemonade kept me invigorated. Late nights and early mornings were the worst, when the supplements and drugs would dissipate and I’d be left to fight off another hydra’s head which, though it lessened, still peaked. There would be afternoons where my fever disappeared completely
But on the fourth morning of my infirmity, I woke up with the worst throat pain of my life. As a child, I had a tonsillectomy following several recurrent bouts against gorgeal maladies. And while Strep Throat and Tonsillitis possess a sort of powdered pain, something crosshatched and bacterial—like bloom on grapes, or dusted sugar on a lemon square. This felt more as though someone had anesthetized me asleep, and while I dreamt my fever dreams of happy trashcans singing vaudeville tunes, the viroids had screwed several dirty needles into the seams between my palates and my uvula—only to, in concert, ring them with miniature orthopedic hammers (fashioned from several crystalline enzymes) to wake me like the bells of Notre Dame.
I spent the better part of six hours salting water glasses, gargling, and expectorating what little mucus I could dredge into my grimy sink. By the time the penetrant vibes had subsided, it was 10 AM and I was overtaken by waves of coughing. I must, again, inform my readers that coughing is rarity to me. The last time I could remember such a fit was when I was 12, and afflicted with the Croup. Like the throat pain, the coughs were dry, but rattled me entirely. I had been contemplating calling my place of employment to let them know that I would be totally fine soon after, but now I was rethinking this. Fortunately, I was able to spend the day chugging antitussives recommended phonewise by Impy. Stifled, I enjoyed books and things, partook with relative disinterest in a lightly spiced frozen chicken (O, what I’d do to savor the fat now!), and let the occasional whoop sound me down to dreamland.
And it was when I awoke again that then I realized I’d lost all chemical senses.
Now, this is not near so the Neuropathy before. I have felt the anhedonia that comes from feeling linoleum tiles. All calloused, and blindfooted: This callow chitin. What would you do if your vision stuffed with mucus? The lines of music from the air adiaphanized, binding with a fungoid gauze—bourn no more, but moistened much with mulch.
For Synesthetes, this portends a kind of blindness of the brain. When I was a child, I thought of things as having what I called a QIRN. That is, the aggregate experience of an item’s totality by me, as separate from others. It was Immutable. A person may QIRNs in several forms bestow. Once was grass—Earthen Cilia, Path, Harrowing Zoo, The Placid Joy of Saturday, or Guilt’s Expiation.
Now?
Glorified Turf.
***
When Jimmy Joyce lost his eyesight, Samuel Beckett sat rapt in that Parisian flat, avidly copyediting. He had lain with his daughter to ascend thus, and winced at the praetor’s subconscious contempt. Both were termed insane by Carl Jung.
The quiet master posed his mind’s attacks
on lexic rules with ensign’s weapons rare:
Though his pupils are useless, he still cries.
***
Currently, I’m quaffing a quotidian cocktail fit with Lion’s Mane Mushrooms, Magnesium, Fluticasone Propionate, Acetyl-L Carnitine & Alpha Lipoic Acid.
It’s still anyone’s guess as to if this will help. It hasn’t for the past three months.
It’s still anyone’s guess as to the ailment’s longterm effects.
Do I have brain damage? Is my heart going to give out in a couple months? From Ischemia? I had enough to worry about when there wasn’t anything wrong with me. In this country, thousands of my students enter with stories of relatives succumbing to wet, hacking spasms of this, The King of the Virions. Desceptive, arch, all hunched in primal knockty-nocty.
I hate the tears besprending the bedspread when I think on what I’ve lost.
And there are times when I’m much more Epicurean, or Stoic about it. What’s one fewer sensation to eventually lose when I’m neutralized? If I trick myself, anosmia’s a Katastematic pleasure after all.
Sulfur no longer.
I cannot smell but whispers of the eaves dripping sludge after a rainstorm.
I cannot smell the totality of effects in a market stall—only one or two at a time.
I cannot sense the smell of myself in my own apartment—but an approximation of dust.
I cannot sense the body odor, perfumes, the spittle, the wax, the skin of my students save one pass directly by me on accident. Please, come back—though I know it isn’t allowed.
Undetermined Bergamot. Hints from the wind go over my head.
If you could feel pressure on your finger, but neither temperature or pain—would such be called touch?
If you could feast in vision from afar, but never kiss—would you take this love?
I would. I do.
Long time have Impy and I been apart, the flesh but pixels reconfigured, and pheromones like flowers crushed in tomes. Comminution of a dead perfume, soaked infinitesimally in yellowed pages.
There is passion here! There is transcendence! And what is sought shall be regained.
Ardor cures. I goad further loss.
Go ahead, Just take away sense; I’ve lost them all at times.
My eyes are weak; I’ve worn glasses since nine.
Shall this unrhot the green? Yea, it may.
I had hyposthenia recently.
What a pleasure is it when the pain returns; what a joy for tender grazings.
I will eat the world with my hands, feet, head, and all. Thank a God for my nervousness!
I knew an ear infection once that knocked me off my feet. He plunged me like a paramecium—rent me four-legged, sonifaulty.
But that went away as well.
What will I do, wallowing as I might even with the relative promise that my fickle scents may soon return? One can’t help but feel like George at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, or Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. When Beethoven went deaf, he’d put organ to ear and percuss himself.
And I do suppose that maybe there is a Christian undertone here—faith. Imagination, and faith, that beyond the cobwebby pikingpale of sinuses insensate, something (a tremendous fart; the perfume of a lily; Petrichor; zephyrs pregnant with plastics) may well come back after all.
***
Egyptian Homer never wonders where his home has gone. He found one novel with his rustling voice.
My anodyne is as yet writ.
Elsewhere, Eurasia.
