pus and pain, that's the final * reward. pus and pain and obscurity. he's in a small unkept rose garden. with sayer. *
that's the problem with a unique disease. once it no longer rages, i'm telling you, it becomes very unfashionable. . he buries his face into his mask, manages to get some deep breaths into his lungs and shakes his head at sayer.
what would i be without this thing? a man with a1 shred of dignity le_ft.
god forbid, no. he lights a cigarette, coughs and puts it out.
how many have you found there?
how are they?
yes. children who fell asleep.
most died during the acute stage of the illness, during a sleep so deep they couldn't be roused. a sleep that in most cases lasted several months. the doctors, in the dark, watch forty year old footage projected onto a screen by a pre-world war ii bell & howell - a motionless man in a chair, his head thrust back, mouth gaping open, arms suspended out from an emaciated torso as if from invisible strings.
those who survived, who awoke, seemed fine, as though nothing had happened. years went by - five, ten, fifteen - before anyone suspected they were not well. . they were not. a doctor, this doctor decades younger, appears beside the subject on the screen and lowers the man's arms.
i began to see them in the early 1930's - old people brought in by their children, young people brought in by their parents - all of them complaining they weren't "themselves" anymore. they'd grown distant, aloof, anti-social, they daydreamed at the dinner table. i referred them to psychiatrists. the man on the screen disappears and is replaced by a seal- shaped woman in whom a hundred strange diseases seem to reside. they conspire against her, torment and harass her, force her to perform incessant and meaningless actions with her hands, to paw her chin, to flutter, to adjust glasses that aren't there.
0 they're not. the virus didn't : spare the higher faculties.
yes.
because the alternative is unthinkable.