A Sci-fi Memoir, Masquerading as a Covid

Cautionary Tale

As if I were flying my spaceship over a no-landing zone where families frolicked while secretly plotting the dismemberment of each other. “So that’s what it’s come down to,” Billy, my robot copilot said. He/she was a conundrum of metal and wires, often as baffling as a basketful of nose hairs I once saw displayed at a museum. My specialty was guiding tourists through an assortment of apocalyptic landscapes in the hope that they’d change their ways. They were an odd collection of confusion: a guy who was seventy before he had his first erection; a teenager who kept saying, “Boss, you gotta light? Boss, is that a revolver in your back pocket?”; a tiny bacteria that had morphed into a head with two eyes, a mouth, and orange hair and had gone on to become president. But Billy knew how to handle them. He could talk a lion into becoming a vegan. “Poor rage-ridden America,” he said. “Get off your white horse. Quarantine your anger and hug a tree”—which made me laugh as I made a sharp left turn, heading for a just-discovered circle of hell where guillotines spotted the hillsides like crosses, and the executioners spent all day admiring each other’s black hoods. 

The Lost Day of Creation

On the eighth day of quarantine, my friend and I sat on the living-room floor petting my pug. All week she’d been giving us the creeps, acting superior, as if taunting us with her doggie immunity. Every time I’d throw something at the wall or start to cry, she’d roll contentedly onto her back, appearing to smile. But then it’s often hard to know with pugs. They’re crafty. Just when you think they’re almost human, they’ll act like real dogs and crap on the rug. “Nothing but endless fields of nothingness in that head,” my sick, drunken friend said. Which made me don my little red shaman hat and yank it over my ears . . . whereupon, the smell of ancient stories enveloped me, along with the odor of garlic and steamed hyacinths. I was expecting a symbol-rich prelude to a new myth that would do justice to the moment, but the world, as usual, was tongue-tied, as if waiting for me to make the next move . . .

Philosophy 101

I met her in the fruit and vegetable aisle. At the time I was trying to get “regular.” That is to say, I was 25% per cent of the man I wanted to be, and 5% of the man everyone else wanted me to be. Isn’t that how it always plays out? A humble attempt at self-examination that ends up making even the worst of us lay down our crossbows and turn to philosophy. Or booze. We had a quick socially distanced conversation about men who get calf implants, then split a Slim Jim in the parking lot, musing on the erotic assonance of the term. We scanned the horizon wondering whose mental disorder would appear first. “You go first,” I said. “No you go,” she said back. It was one heady afternoon, so heady that if she had hugged me and said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,” I wouldn’t have been surprised.