The Bug

(copyright © by John E. Simpson)

An aggressive virus or infection was making the rounds at work that week, its rheumy-eyed victims wheezing and sneezing, spraying one another with the watery detritus of respiration, lobbing the bug back and forth like a soggy medicine ball.

The company executives were immune to the bug’s effects, insulated as they were by hermetic elevator access to the floor which they occupied. Everyone else got it, though.  First to go were the secretaries, who were most frequently talked to and hence rained upon by everyone else; then the housekeeping staff, who picked it up on their hands and fingers while ministering to the restroom fixtures; finally the middle managers, who rarely ventured forth from their offices except to meet with one another, by which time the bug — with no one left to attack out in the open — had moved to the conference rooms, waiting for fresh meat to come to it.

Webster picked up the disease sometime on Tuesday; in retrospect, he thought it might have come from a communal coffee mug he’d found on the counter between the office’s Mr. Coffee machine and the now-empty institutional-size carton of Kleenex. Distracted by the eerie unwonted silence of the coffee room, he’d neglected to wash the mug out more than twice before using it. Normally he was a fanatic about that, even at home — let alone at work, where God only knew who might have used it last and for what purpose.

Later, by the end of the day, his handkerchief was soggy and limp, his nose incandescent, his hands trembling like newborn puppies. But the bug had first declared its presence at around lunchtime in the form of a dull throbbing ache to either side of his nose, inside his sinuses; it felt as though his face were bulging upwards, and his cheeks stretching to merge with his eye sockets. That’s what he told Dr. Morse when he stopped at his office on the way home from work.

“Mm-hmm,” said Dr. Morse, neutral as usual, echoing Webster’s words as though they’d really registered. “Merge, you say? With the sockets?” He put the mirrored disk of his stethoscope on Webster’s chest and said, “Cough,” which Webster did. Then he removed the stethoscope from his ears and sat back in the dainty typist’s chair from which he conducted all examinations, his hands in his lap. Held loosely in one hand, the stethoscope’s vermillion rubber tubes writhed spasmodically, like an earthworm run over by a bicycle tire, and Webster’s gut churned in sympathy.

Dr. Morse regarded Webster solemnly for a moment. The news, Webster was certain, was not good. Then what? He lived alone — who would take care of him during his decline? Who would pay his bills, fix his meals, change his bedclothes, wash his underwear, and at the last summon 911 to apply those huge electroshock suction cups, futilely, to his chest…?

Suddenly Dr. Morse was seized by a sneezing spell whose onset so startled him that he jumped to his feet; he sneezed three times (weird yelping sneezes they were, “Arp! Arp! Arp!” like the neurotic vocalizations of a toy dog) — not into the handkerchief which he had yanked from a pocket, but into the hand holding the stethoscope. Wheezing and sniffing, he mopped at himself with the handkerchief. “Sorry,” he said, “excuse me. What I was going to say was, it’s just something going around, nothing to worry about.” He recommended that Webster stay home from work for a few days, get bed rest. And fluids, lots of fluids. Flush those poisons out, he said, arpped again, and patted Webster on the shoulder.

—-

Webster was not used to being sick, nor was he used to staying at home, indoors, for days at a time. He’d need to prepare for this, he thought as he walked to his car from Dr. Morse’s office. Fluids, also food. Maybe soup and Saltines? His mother had always fed him soup and Saltines and something called “flat Coke” when he was sick. Unfailingly, the monotonous grue  of the regimen had sent him, heaving, to the toilet. Flush those poisons out.

He stopped for his sick-food at the only convenience store in town, a 7-11 owned and operated by a Native American couple.

Webster’s only information about the Indians came from his neighbor, Mrs. Wilkerson. The Local Enquirer. “The 7-11!” she’d yelled to him across the road once, months ago, when they’d walked out to check their mailboxes at the same time. She paused while a tractor trailer roared past. “Did you hear? Indians! I don’t know what tribe but they’re Indians all right! Yes! Indians! From Oklahoma!”

Mrs. Wilkerson’s willingness to share such data was generally in inverse proportion to its truth. But from then on Webster spent as little time as possible in the store. He worried the Native Americans might fancy, in his neurotic sidelong glances and slumping shoulders, the guilty DNA of a Little Big Horn survivor’s descendant.

From a little wire rack alongside the Slurpee dispenser, the couple sold decorative swatches of cowhide hand-tooled with an assortment of primitive objects and mystical geometric designs. Pyramids, antelope from which protruded the shafts of stylized arrows and spears, radiant eyeballs. “EVERY ONE UNQIUE!!!” said a cheap masking-tape label on the rack, through which showed the words TV Guide.

“Don’t let that hand-tooling fool you,” Mrs. Wilkerson had confided to him on another occasion, after running across the road and collaring him on the front lawn before he’d been able to escape into his house. “It looks very exotic but why, you could do it yourself.” Her eyebrows twitched. “They used a plain old soldering iron! Bought it at a Sears in Tulsa. A soldering iron, you believe that?”

—-

At home, Webster put the Caffeine-Free diet Coke in the refrigerator and (while water for the Cup-a-Soup was heating) changed into pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. He rummaged through the steamer trunk in which he stored seldom-used linens, extracting from it the red-white-and-green afghan he’d bought at a neighboring church’s annual Christmas bazaar, years ago. Musty it was, fragrant with the perfume of neglect, but it would do. He draped it over himself as he sat with his feet up on the coffee table, mug of instant soup and plate of Saltines and glass of soda on the end table beside him. He picked up the television remote-control, ate a cracker, and scanned the TV program listing in the newspaper.

Nothing in the complex grid seemed the least bit interesting, and he tossed it aside. Maybe his eyes, burning with fever, would latch onto something visual which had not appealed to his brain when presented in the dull black-and-white of the newspaper schedule. He blew his nose into the paper towel he was using as a napkin, scattering crumbs. Then he took a sip of soup and a sip of soda, and turned the TV on.

Although he had subscribed to cable television for years now, Webster scarcely ever watched it. Even so, he had observed long ago that many of the channels carried on cable were not itemized in the program listing — evidently because they showed the same thing, more or less, every minute of every day.

Here was a channel, for example, which broadcast nothing but an interminable succession of local real-estate advertisements, the washed-out Polaroid photographs of split levels, condos, and ugly vacant lots accompanied not by voiceover sales pitches but by muted Latin dance tunes, cha-cha and rhumba, sometimes a tango for variety. How desperate could local realtors be? He ate a cracker, clicked the remote’s channel-up button, took a swallow of soup.

A channel of twenty-four-hour music videos was next. Unlike the real estate channel, he was sure, this one got lots of viewers, all day and all night; but Webster himself had never been able to identify — let alone identify with — any of the messages presumably being communicated by the dancers’ writhing hormones, the announcers’ deadpan irony, the vocalists’ dreamy soft-focus closeups as they brooded about Satanism, body-piercing, sex with one another and animals, and all the reasons the pains and terrors of youth lacerated the soul more savagely than those of adulthood. He swallowed some soup and ate another cracker, leaving its crumbs in his mouth as he drank an ounce of diet Coke and swished it around, and again pressed channel-up.

An all-day weather channel was next, followed by all-news-all-the-time. Situation comedy re-runs, police-drama re-runs, home shopping networks, preachers of sundry creeds and credibilities, twenty-four-hour sports, twenty-four-hour comedy, and twenty-four-hour cartoons, legislative sessions, and Spanish-language celebrity news. At last, his mug of soup and glass of Coke empty, his head clogged and threatening eruption, he settled on a channel specializing in broadcasts of old and foreign movies, swung his feet up on the sofa, and pulled the Christmas afghan up to his chin.

This movie was both old and foreign, a strange black-and-white romantic musical comedy made somewhere in Europe in the early 1930s, its stars’ lips inexpertly dubbed into English in British accents of unlikely breeding and tone. Not until the movie was nearly over did he realize he had seen it before. The guy, oh yeah, right: he got the girl and the two of them jazz-danced away down a winding cobblestoned Autobahn eerily empty of traffic, vanishing into the orb of the setting sun and their presumably blissful future. Unforgettable, now that he remembered it.

He blinked groggily, looked at his watch. Nearly eleven o’clock. Plenty of bed rest, Morse had said. Webster sat up and pointed the remote control at the television, meaning to shut it off but pressing by mistake the channel-up button.

“—in Idaho this week,” a gray-suited announcer was saying as he aimed his own remote-control at a map of the United States and zoomed in on the eastern portion of that state, the plaster cast into which Montana was pressing its craggy western face.

The rectangle in which the map was set was bordered by a thick frame of solid black. In the top of this frame, lettered in a dull caterpillar-green, was the phrase normalized mortality rate. The announcer’s hand passed in circles over Idaho Falls and Pocatello as though blessing them. They evidently needed some kind of sacrament: laying siege to both cities, all the way out to their farthest suburbs, were a pair of ashen ovals, at each of their centers a smaller charcoal-gray blob. Twin cigarette burns in the map’s flesh. Checking the grays against the black-to-white scale conveniently provided below the title, Webster saw that these sections of Idaho were currently experiencing a Normalized Mortality Rate — whatever that was — in the range of forty to sixty percent.

The announcer, smiling back over his shoulder at the camera, waving his hands over the map, was now explaining something about “the correlation between the urban violent-crime rate and the overall normalized mortality rate.” Webster wasn’t really listening, though; he was trying to figure out just what it was he had stumbled onto.

He pressed the remote’s recall button, which informed him that it was now 11:06 pm and that he was tuned to channel 71. The television schedule did not identify a channel 71 at all, which meant that this — whatever it was — went on all day. But what was it?

No sooner had he asked himself that question than the announcer answered it for him. Still smiling, he put his remote-control into a side pocket of his suit jacket and patted the pocket flap down over it. “In a few minutes we’ll take a look at the national morbidity picture here on The Dead Channel. But first, these messages.” His image and that of Idaho’s Normalized Mortality Rate dissolved, replaced by a station-identification panel — bordered in black, with a drawing of what must be lilies in the lower right corner — which confirmed (in an elegant shadowed script which created the effect of having been embossed upon Webster’s screen) that this was, indeed, The Dead Channel.

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