Rare Air
Part Four
Writing this all down now, looking out of the one eye I can still manage to see out of. I just can’t believe it all. I’m glad no one will be around to read this. No one should. Man’s last declaration shouldn’t be scrawled on some yellowed legal pad written in chicken scratch and covered in the mysterious stains of the writer’s crude, torn up hands.
No one told us how this was going to end. If there’s an original sin in all of this, it’s that no one told us how bad this was going to be, or maybe someone did and most of us just didn’t listen. I watched a man just, sit down and give up and die on a nature trail. That was my first introduction to this plague. It wasn’t gruesome, or awful, he didn’t explode or get back up and start moaning like something out of some horror movie.
Fuck me! Maybe that’s the reason I didn’t take it seriously earlier. Maybe that’s why so many of us didn’t. The end didn’t look like it was supposed to. No Hollywood budget with the appropriate pacing, dialogue and post-apocalyptic feel. No love scenes or plot twists. Some talking heads came on the television and told us to keep to ourselves. Some others came on later and told us to avoid and report sudden instances of mood swings in loved ones or lethargy.
How in the blue fuck do you quantify lethargy and mood swings in the twenty first century?
Well, my bestie hasn’t told me how much they want to eat a bullet…this week, so I guess they’re good.
Not that I’m saying we were all weak or affected. Life was shit for most of us before all this. That’s the real issue at hand. How do you suddenly predict or decide if someone is suddenly having a problem, when damn near all of us already had plenty of them? How do you quantify misery in the age of the miserable?
This wasn’t the flu on steroids or some novel form of a potentially larger viral pandemic. This wasn’t round two of the same old, same old. This was the double whammy. Two entirely separate issues that we refused to accept until it was too damn late. We were lucky in the past, mostly lucky anyway. That dreaded, once in a hundred-year sickness, stuck true to form and sure it came back sometimes and bit the populace in the ass but we knew that and could recognize what we were dealing with.
My second dealing with it wasn’t nearly as simple and hands off as the first. She didn’t just sit down and give up and expire. Mrs. Alvarado raged like a three-alarm fire. She lived with her husband up in apartment twenty-one, over at the far corner of our little complex. The county people, the ever present “them” in their full PPE came along and took her husband away the week before. He went out stage one, slow and quiet. He just sat down on the toilet one morning with a bit of a cough and never got up.
Sadie, Mrs. Alvarado. She went out type two. I helped her cook a pig roast out in the pit we dug as a group in the little common area of our complex by the mailboxes a few days after they took her husband away. She was sad, probably as sad as any one could ever be, but she was also kind, and humane. She had frozen meat that would go bad soon and she was happy to help organize a way to use it up. “Even with the two of us, it would have been too much to eat.”
I didn’t bother to ask her about the rest of her family or if there had been anyone else. One of the other neighbors caught that bullet for me while I cut up onions and peppers and kept my head down. “We had a daughter, Eva. She was killed, a car accident, it was years ago.”
Three days after that feast, Sadie tried to set her apartment on fire. A few of us came running and managed to put it out before it got out of hand but we all realized there was something really wrong. Sadie was talking in broken English, she kept repeating the same words, in both languages, like her mind was stuck on repeat. She kept talking about her husband and Eva. At one point she started talking to another one of our neighbors like she was her daughter. It felt gross to play on her emotions but she was hysterical and she had already tried to burn her apartment to the ground. A few of us begged the woman to just smile and play the part. Even worse Sadie fixated on me and decided I was her husband.
I sat across from Sadie, in her half-burnt apartment, after everyone else left. I sat there and listened to her call me by someone else’s name. I sat and nodded and used what little Spanish I knew to try and play along as she revisited the dark montage that was her marriage.
Maybe that was the plague too. Maybe half of what she said was make believe, maybe most of it, who cares. I sat there and tried to keep along and respond in kind and I listened to her talk about the mistresses and the miscarriages. I listened to her rant and rave, tied up and trying to free herself so she could cause more mischief and mayhem.
I stayed with Sadie when the rest of the complex was happy to avoid her and her apartment completely and I lived parts of her life before she finally died. It wasn’t lazy, it didn’t come quick. Type two is a whole different animal. Sadie Alvarado died raving and nearly howling about the man she loved and the daughter she lost and I have no doubt that she would have gladly killed me and set fire to her surroundings once again if she had been freed.